Author : Sarah Perreard, Co-founder of Earth Action (EA)

Two things happened this month, on two continents, in the same pattern. On 22 September, the European Commission published the Simplified ESRS and the new voluntary reporting standard in the Official Journal of the EU, entering into force on 10 November. Three weeks earlier, on 1 September, California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) issued guidance for the first SB 253 reporting cycle and opened a voluntary intake platform, ahead of a first deadline that falls on the same date, 10 November. In both cases, companies are being told how to report before the rulebook behind that report is settled. 

What actually changed 

In the EU, the Simplified ESRS cuts the mandatory datapoint count by roughly 61% compared to the original standards, part of an Omnibus reduction the Commission puts above 70% once voluntary disclosures are included. EFRAG followed three days after the Official Journal publication with its own 2026 draft datapoint list, consolidating around 530 items. That list carries no legal force. It is secretariat support material, open for fatal flaw review until 23 October, alongside a separate consultation on the draft ESRS XBRL taxonomy running until 11 November. 

In California, CARB’s guidance tells companies they only need to report emissions data already in their possession or already being collected as of December 2024. A company with nothing to report can file a statement of non-reporting instead. The voluntary platform lets companies register early, submit Scope 1 and 2 data, or simply notify CARB ahead of the deadline. What it cannot yet offer is certainty: CARB’s own Initial Regulation, the rule that will govern the mandatory version of this reporting cycle, is still awaiting approval from the Office of Administrative Law. 

The pattern, not the headline 

Read separately, these look like two stories about administrative delay. Read together, they describe something more specific: regulators issuing operational guidance while the instrument behind it is still moving. That is a different kind of uncertainty than the one companies have spent the last two years reacting to. The question is no longer whether mandatory reporting is coming. It is which exact datapoints, which exact thresholds, will end up in the final version. 

“The instability is in the wrong place. Thresholds and datapoint counts move, that is what a simplification package is for. What does not move is whether a company knows where its emissions, its materials, its plastic actually go.” 
— Sarah Perreard, Co-founder of Earth Action 

Why this argues for building now, not waiting 

There is a precedent for exactly this kind of ambiguity, and it comes from carbon reporting. CDP started as a voluntary initiative in 2000. By the time mandatory frameworks arrived, the EU’s Non-Financial Reporting Directive in 2014, UK mandatory greenhouse gas reporting in 2013, CSRD in 2024, companies that had already been disclosing through CDP were the ones ready to comply. The 2024 disclosure cycle saw more than 5,000 companies voluntarily report their plastics impacts through CDP, a 90% increase on 2023, ahead of any global treaty or binding plastics disclosure rule. 

Plastic footprinting followed the same order. The methodologies behind the Plastic Footprint Network were built and used by companies years before any current reporting mandate specified which plastic datapoints to disclose. The regulation did not create the demand for that data. It caught up to companies that already had it, because they had built their measurement system around the underlying question, not around a specific draft. 

That is the distinction worth acting on this month. A data system built to match the current EFRAG list, or the current CARB template, has to be rebuilt every time the draft changes, and both drafts are explicitly still open for revision. A data system built to answer where emissions, materials, and plastic actually flow through the business survives every redraft, because the redraft is an argument about which subset of that answer gets reported, not about whether the answer matters. 

What this means in practice 

• Start or continue an emissions or plastic footprint assessment now, using the methodology available (PFN for plastic, GHG Protocol-aligned tools for carbon), rather than waiting for the final datapoint list. 

• Treat CARB’s December 2024 data cutoff and EFRAG’s 530-item draft as a floor, not a target. Measuring more than the current draft requires costs less than measuring exactly to a draft that changes again in a year. 

• Keep the underlying data granular enough (by site, by material, by scope) to be re-cut against whichever final requirement lands, rather than pre-aggregated to match one specific template. 

• Log every hour spent on this quarter’s data collection as infrastructure, not compliance cost. It does not depreciate when the rule changes. 

Companies that build to the question rather than the citation are not betting on a specific outcome in Brussels or Sacramento. They are betting that the question itself, what a company’s real footprint is, will still be the one worth answering once the drafts are final. That is a safer bet than the alternative. 

Need support mapping your data against what is coming, rather than what is currently on paper? Get in touch at contact@e-a.earth or visit www.e-a.earth.