The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures was established by the Financial Stability Board and published its recommendations in 2017. Those recommendations gave the world the four-pillar structure — governance, strategy, risk management, metrics and targets — that every climate disclosure framework now uses, including the ISSB’s.
In 2023 the ISSB issued IFRS S2, which fully incorporates the TCFD recommendations. The FSB then asked the IFRS Foundation to take over monitoring progress on climate-related disclosures, and the Task Force was disbanded.
The practical consequence: if you report under IFRS S2, you are reporting against the TCFD recommendations. You do not need a separate TCFD report, and a request for one is usually a request for the climate section of your disclosure. If you already report to TCFD, your existing structure maps almost directly — the work is in the additional specificity S2 requires around metrics, basis of preparation and connected information.
The Global Reporting Initiative asks a different question. Where the ISSB standards ask how sustainability matters affect your enterprise value, GRI asks how your organisation affects the economy, environment and people — including human rights.
That is impact materiality rather than financial materiality, and it is the reason GRI has not been absorbed into anything. Its audience is broader than investors: employees, communities, civil society, regulators, customers. Many Nigerian companies with development finance relationships, international buyers, or significant local footprints report to GRI for reasons that have nothing to do with capital markets.
The two are explicitly designed to be usable together. GRI and the IFRS Foundation have a collaboration agreement, and a growing number of companies publish an ISSB-based disclosure for investors and a GRI-based report for wider stakeholders, built from one dataset.
Knowing which test applies is what stops a disclosure being either bloated or incomplete.
| ISSB (IFRS S1/S2) | GRI | EU CSRD | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Question asked | Could this affect our prospects? | How do we affect the world? | Both |
| Primary audience | Investors, lenders, creditors | All stakeholders | Investors and stakeholders |
| Name | Financial materiality | Impact materiality | Double materiality |
| Relevance in Nigeria | The adopted requirement | Widely used voluntarily, often required by DFIs | Reaches Nigerian companies via EU parents or large EU customers |
A matter can be material under one test and not another. That is not a contradiction — they are measuring different things.
The climate section of your IFRS S2 disclosure, with a short note explaining that S2 incorporates the TCFD recommendations and that the Task Force was disbanded in 2023. In our experience that answer is accepted immediately; the request is usually just habit.
No. The Nigerian framework adopts the ISSB standards, and a GRI report is not a substitute. It is a valuable complement, and the two can share underlying data, but they are not interchangeable for compliance.
The one you are legally required to file. Build the ISSB-based disclosure first, because it is mandatory and because its data requirements are the more demanding of the two. Adding a GRI report afterwards from the same dataset is far easier than the reverse.
A summary of a regulation is not the regulation. These are the primary documents this page is based on.
Four questions, and you get the year you first file, the framework, and what to collect first.
Plain-language explainers of the FRC and SEC rules, ISSB S1 & S2, and what each asks you to disclose.
What a consultant-led reporting cycle costs against an annual licence, in Naira.
