Future-Fit and Other Initiatives
How Future-Fit complements other initiatives
We're not here to reinvent the wheel. Insofar as we can, we build on and align with what's already out there. Read on to find out how our work complements other key initiatives.
B Corporations
B Corporations strive to balance profit and purpose. Future-Fit can help them on the journey, by giving them a clear destination to aim for and a way to steer toward it.
Any company can pursue Certified B Corporation (B Corp) status by meeting B Lab’s certification requirements. These include embedding a commitment to stakeholder governance into the company’s legal framework, meeting rigorous performance requirements across B Lab’s impact topics (such as governance, workers, community, environment, and customers), undergoing independent verification, and publicly sharing its impact performance on bcorporation.net.
Every B Corp is seeking to be a force for good in the world. The Future-Fit Business Benchmark can help them live up to that aim, by providing a holistic way to assess the positive and negative impacts of every decision they make.
EU Taxonomy
The EU Taxonomy is a classification system that identifies which economic activities can be considered environmentally sustainable for investment and reporting purposes. It provides companies and financial institutions with a clear framework for disclosing the environmental impact of their activities, helping to guide capital toward sustainable outcomes. Future-Fit supports organizations in navigating this framework by clarifying what “doing no harm” means in practice and helping to report impact in a consistent, comparable way.
The Taxonomy Regulation, which entered into force in July 2020, sets out the principles for determining sustainability. To qualify as environmentally sustainable, an economic activity must meet four overarching conditions, as well as the technical screening criteria defined by the European Commission for each of six environmental objectives:
Climate change mitigation
Climate change adaptation
Sustainable use and protection of water and marine resources
Transition to a circular economy
Pollution prevention and control
Protection and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems
Companies in scope under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) are required to disclose how their activities align with these objectives — including both the eligibility of their activities and their alignment with the Taxonomy’s criteria. This ensures investors and stakeholders have access to transparent, decision-useful information.
Recent amendments to the Taxonomy framework (including simplification measures adopted in 2025) aim to reduce reporting complexity and administrative burden while maintaining comparability and reliability of sustainability disclosures.
Future-Fit helps organizations meet these requirements by providing practical guidance to manage impacts holistically, identify material risks, and produce concise, decision-ready disclosures that satisfy both the Taxonomy and CSRD reporting obligations.
The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)
The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) significantly expands sustainability reporting requirements for companies operating in the EU. It requires organisations to disclose how their activities impact society and the environment, as well as how sustainability issues create financial risks and opportunities for the business. Reported information must also be independently assured.
CSRD applies to a much broader group of companies than its predecessor, including large EU companies, listed SMEs, and certain non-EU companies with substantial operations in the EU.
The directive replaces the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) and is designed to improve the consistency, comparability, and reliability of sustainability information. CSRD reporting is aligned with the EU Taxonomy Regulation and is underpinned by the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS).
By improving the quality and harmonisation of sustainability disclosures, CSRD ensures that investors and other stakeholders have access to decision-useful information on companies’ impacts, risks, and opportunities related to sustainability and climate change. Over time, this harmonisation is expected to reduce reporting complexity and costs for companies.
The first wave of companies are required to apply CSRD for the 2024 financial year, with reports published in 2025.
Future-Fit aligns strongly with CSRD by helping companies understand and manage their most material sustainability impacts, risks, and dependencies. In particular, the Future-Fit Business Benchmark provides practical insight into real-world impact risks and supports more robust, decision-ready inputs for CSRD and ESRS reporting.
Global Reporting Initiative
The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) creates and maintains the most widely-used sustainability reporting standards. Future-Fit can help any company which publishes a GRI report to gain more insight from the data it is already collecting.
GRI standards require the collection of hundreds of data-points spanning all major social and environmental issues. Thousands of companies around the world have been gathering these data for many years.
The Future-Fit Business Benchmark's Break-Even Goals define the line in the sand all companies must strive to reach, on issues ranging from greenhouse gas emissions to employee rights. A complementary set of indicators enable any company to monitor its progress toward each goal as a simple percentage.
These progress indicators have been designed specifically to help companies make better day-to-day decisions in key areas such as procurement and product design. And any organization already producing a GRI report is probably already in possession of most of the data needed to calculate them.
Science-Based Targets
The Science-Based Target (SBT) initiative helps organizations set the right ambitions to play their part in tackling the climate crisis. Future-Fit can help any such organization monitor and explain its SBT progress and trajectory in a concise, comparable way.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sets out what level of action is needed worldwide to adapt to and mitigate the worst effects of climate change, in particular by defining the "global carbon budget" which must not be exceeded.
Setting SBTs involves a ‘fair share’ approach to dividing up the global carbon budget, so every business will have to step up. Any organization which commits to an SBT should thus be recognized – and Future-Fit supports this by providing a consistent way for all users to explain the extent of and reasons for their GHG elimination commitments, and their progress and plans toward reaching them.
SDGs
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) serve as a global call to action to protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all – and the Future-Fit Business Benchmark helps any business respond holistically to them.
By pursuing future-fitness, all businesses can make credible positive contributions to the SDGs, while simultaneously working to ensure that they aren’t inadvertently undermining progress elsewhere. You can find out more by following the link below.
Task-Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures
The TCFD is working to establish consistent, meaningful climate reporting. Future-Fit can play a supporting role here, by helping any business to identify and manage its climate-related challenges in the context of other systemic issues.
For a company to implement the full TCFD guidelines, many key business functions will have to be engaged – and it is hoped that this will lead to greater awareness and action across the organization.
The Future-Fit Business Benchmark can support such engagement, by equipping companies with actionable guidance and a set of progress indicators which can be used to improve understanding and decision-making across an organisation, in areas ranging from procurement to product design.
Flourishing Business Canvas
The Flourishing Business Canvas is a visual collaborative design tool that enables leaders to co-create the Future-Fit business model of their organization and communicate a shared understanding of what their organization must become in order to be Future-Fit.
The Flourishing Business Canvas prompts leaders to consider the necessary and sufficient social, environmental and economic business model factors required to meet the Future-Fit Break-Even Goals and contribute to the Positive Pursuit Goals. This enables leaders to explore alternative pathways to becoming Future-Fit, whilst exploring all the sources of material risk and opportunity that are emerging.
The Flourishing Business Canvas was rigorously developed over a 10 year period, informed by academic research, with 1000’s of leaders and entrepreneurs in 47 countries applying the canvas to their businesses.
The Flourishing Business Canvas is promoted by a not-for-profit that makes it freely available for use, and convenes an active world-wide community of canvas practitioners.
Download the Canvas from https://www.FlourishingBusiness.org, learn more at https://youTube.com/@FlourishingBiz
International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB)
The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), part of the IFRS Foundation, develops globally consistent standards for companies to disclose material sustainability-related information that is relevant to investors and financial markets. Its standards provide a high-quality, comprehensive global baseline for sustainability reporting.
The ISSB builds on the work of market-led, investor-focused reporting initiatives, including the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB), Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), Value Reporting Foundation’s Integrated Reporting Framework and SASB Standards, as well as the World Economic Forum’s Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics.
The Future-Fit Business Benchmark complements ISSB standards by addressing extra-financial materiality — what matters at a societal and environmental level — helping investors and companies understand systemic impacts and manage the long-term health of the global economy.
www.ifrs.org/groups/international-sustainability-standards-board/