On Thursday 18 December, the European Commission published guidelines to help stakeholders prepare for the new simplified rules in the EU taxonomy for sustainable economic activities, which will apply from January 2026.
This text simplifies certain elements of the delegated act on information to be provided. On the one hand, it allows reporting companies to focus their taxonomy reporting on their core activities, by introducing a quantitative materiality threshold below which reporting companies are not required to assess their eligibility and alignment with the taxonomy. It also considerably reduces the number of reporting templates.
In addition, it offers greater flexibility to non-financial companies in the reporting of the operational expenditure key performance indicator (OpEx KPI), and it excludes from the calculation of KPIs of financial undertakings, including the Green Asset Ratio (GAR), exposures to undertakings that are not subject to sustainability reporting.
Lastly, it provides transitional relief for financial companies that are not required to report detailed KPIs in terms of taxonomy. Instead, they may make a statement in their management report.
The number of data points in the reporting templates has been reduced by 89% for financial companies and 66% for non-financial companies, in line with the simplified framework in July (see EUROPE 13674/19).
The guidelines, which take the form of draft answers to frequently asked questions, will be officially adopted in the first quarter of 2026.
Read the guidelines: https://aeur.eu/f/k2v (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)