CSRD. CSDDD. The Omnibus simplification package. Shifting scopes, shifting timelines, shifting definitions of who has to report what, and when. If you work in sustainability, you’ve probably stopped expecting the regulatory picture to hold still for more than a quarter at a time.
Each change gets analysed from a legal and technical angle – what’s in scope, what’s delayed, what’s simplified. What gets discussed far less is the human and organisational cost of constantly re-planning around a moving target.
Compliance is not the same as strategy
Every time the regulatory goalposts move, sustainability teams absorb the work of re-reading, re-interpreting, re-briefing leadership, and re-building reporting processes that may already have taken a year to set up. That’s time that doesn’t go toward supplier engagement, product footprinting, or the strategic initiatives that are supposed to be sustainability’s real contribution to the business.
The result, for many teams, is a function that spends most of its time keeping up with compliance and comparatively little time on the forward-looking work that first justified having a sustainability team in the first place. That’s not necessarily a criticism of any individual team – it may simply be what the current regulatory environment demands. But it’s worth knowing, clearly, whether that’s the norm or whether some organisations have found a way to keep the balance healthier.
Data readiness is the quiet variable
Regulatory change also exposes how strong, or shaky, the underlying data foundations really are. A reporting requirement that assumes clean, audit-ready sustainability data hits very differently depending on whether your organisation already manages that data with the same rigor as Finance, or whether it’s still scattered across spreadsheets, supplier emails, and someone’s institutional memory.
As requirements evolve, the gap between organisations with mature sustainability data management and those without is likely to become more visible, not less. Where does your organisation sit on that spectrum, relative to others navigating the same shifting rules?
A benchmark, not another regulatory update
There’s no shortage of commentary on what the regulation says. There’s very little hard data on how sustainability professionals are actually experiencing the constant recalibration – how much of their time it consumes, how confident they feel in their data, and whether leadership understands the scale of the lift.
The 2026 Sustainability Professional Benchmark was built to answer exactly that. It’s a short European survey covering compliance workload, data maturity, supplier engagement, and organisational influence – the practical realities behind the regulatory headlines. It takes about 10 minutes, and participants will be able to compare their own experience against the wider profession once results are published in November 2026.
If you want to know whether your team’s experience of “regulation that keeps changing” is typical, better, or worse than most – this is the way to find out.
Take the survey and be part of the 2026 Sustainability Professional Benchmark →
