Blog series: Ten Lessons from CSRD Wave 1 for Wave 2
Phase I: Project preparation · Lesson 1 of 10
Wave 1 companies have already made the mistakes Wave 2 companies don’t need to repeat. In this ten-part series, we share the lessons they learned the hard way, one practical lesson at a time. Wave 2 companies (more than 1,000 employees and more than €450 million net turnover) report for the first time in 2028, covering FY2027.
The first lesson from CSRD Wave 1 isn’t technical. It’s about mindset. Too many Wave 1 companies treated CSRD as a filing obligation, something to get through, rather than as a byproduct of becoming genuinely ESG-competent.
The data is already there
Becoming compliant puts a rich, structured set of data and results into your organisation’s hands. Turning that data into strategic management information is a comparatively small additional step. Yet it’s the step Wave 1 companies skipped most often.
The discipline that separates organisations that benefit from CSRD from those that merely survive it is simple: build a follow-up plan the moment the report is published. That way, the insights get used instead of filed away on a shelf.
Climate risk is no longer abstract
There’s an urgent reason to take this step now. Last summer, Europe saw large-scale wildfires and extreme drought, driving real water scarcity. Climate change is a physical risk that touches operations, supply chains and asset values directly.
Organisations that treat CSRD as a filing exercise aren’t building the contingency plans they’ll need to stay resilient as these risks intensify.
The human side of reporting
Compliance-only reporting is demoralising for the people who do the work: data owners, controllers and sustainability leads. When their effort visibly leads somewhere beyond a PDF, it becomes a genuine motivation boost. It also makes the second and third reporting cycles far easier to resource internally.
Connect ESG tracking to the core activities of the business and the improvements that follow. People take the task far more seriously once they can see it moving the business, not just the compliance file.
Practical actions
- Draft a one-page follow-up plan before the report is published, not after.
- Assign named owners to the three or four insights most likely to change a decision.
- Share the CSRD report internally as a management tool, not only externally as a compliance artefact.
Under ESRS 2026: strengthened
The mandatory datapoint floor drops by roughly 70%, and non-material information may no longer be disclosed at all. That widens the gap between a compliant report and a genuinely useful one. Physical-risk asset exposure (E1-11) also becomes mandatory from year one, giving the wildfire and drought argument a direct disclosure hook.
Next in the series: Lesson 2, Do a smart DMA, and use it.
Read all ten lessons
Want all ten lessons in one place? Download the whitepaper “Ten Lessons from CSRD Wave 1 for Wave 2”, or book a demo to see how the Salacia platform supports each phase of your CSRD cycle.
