omnibus musings

Mar 12

published 3.12.25

I’m an attorney by training (and also at heart) and like many, I’ve celebrated the wins, advocated for improvements and closely followed the developments around the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). After much rumoring, the Omnibus Package is live for all of us to dissect, discuss and analyze. The parliamentary process ahead is arduous and convoluted and the end game is still, like much of the political landscape on both sides of the Atlantic, ambiguous and in flux.

And yet, I don’t think there’s much to argue about in terms of what good looks like. We know where the business world can and should do better and we know how to raise the bar:

Comprehensive stakeholder engagement,
Communities at the center,
Effective remedy,
Transparent data reporting and
Actual value chain due diligence.

If your company has already made significant investments and resourced initiatives that would have allowed them to meet CSRD and CSDDD, it would be a missed opportunity to let that work go to waste and backslide. Let’s not forget that “business as usual” would set us back to a world where supply chains are someone else’s problem and people in grassroots communities involved with growing our food, manufacturing our clothes and electronics (and essentially providing us with everything we need to live our day to day lives), are left with limited paths to file grievances, secure remedy, and push for better.

Whether or not it’s been watered down, I’d argue that even without the stick of the law hanging over us, companies can and should still move towards that end game. As sustainability practitioners, we’re often negotiating between carrots and sticks. This is an opportunity to keep pushing for what we know is right (for people and yes, also for the business) even if the stick is (temporarily, we hope) missing.

To learn more about how to navigate regulations during uncertainty, including making the case internally, drop me a line or join us on March 25 at 9 am PT / noon ET for a live, informal human rights office hours.

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