Well, it’s pretty obvious that it’s effectively all over already for the ISSB and its standards so, thanks, that’s all I wanted to say today. Oh wait, I’m picking up some interference…

• (November 2024)The ESG Train is Leaving the Station – Are You on it?
• (May 2024) About a year and a half into the backlash, you are seeing signs of the anti-anti-ESG backlash, wherein market participants are protesting about politicians restricting our freedom to use the asset manager of our choice. It’s back and forth. But honestly, the train has left the station. California—a state with a GDP about the size of Germany’s—last year passed two climate bills, referencing ISSB Standards. Brazil has said ISSB Standards would be mandated from 2026. Turkey has said ’24. Japan said ’25. Singapore said ’25. Korea said ’27. Hong Kong is into it. The UK is currently debating it, as is Canada. 
• (September 2021) If left up to voluntary ESG disclosures, investors may still be in the same position when it comes to comparing ESG performance between companies. More specifically, as IFAC concluded, “…market-driven, voluntary reporting cannot achieve relevant, reliable, and comparable information globally, which is what global capital markets require. Nor is it likely to have legitimacy and backing from public authorities.” For finance professionals, though, that train has left the station. According to Sullivan, developing authoritative sustainability standards under the proposed ISSB is a clear inflection point and inherently brings new accountabilities for the finance function. 
• (February 2023) In sum, regardless of one’s political views, the ESG train has left the station. The capital market, the product market, and the labor market have perhaps already decided that ESG investing is here to stay in the long run.
• (November 2023)…the message I wanted to share is that my impression of engaging with the corporate side of things is that the corporates already recognize that they no longer ask whether they would do ISSB standard or not. That’s no longer a question. They are asking, how do we report on Scope 3? How do we get our value chain data collected? So I think, I mean, I’m very encouraged because it seems the train has left the station in terms of we embarking on this journey of creating this new lingua franca of sustainability disclosure. 

To be honest, “the train has left the station” strikes me as one of the dumber tools in the arsenal of rhetoric: just taken on its own laborious terms, the fact of a train having somehow dragged itself out of the station doesn’t mean it won’t derail around the first bend (consider for example the high percentage of completed corporate mergers that fail to meet their stated goals). In Canada, I’m not sure we can even say the train is at the platform, given that securities regulators have yet to propose anything to make the CSSB’s standards even partially mandatory (and, taking into account the backsliding by the US SEC, the strong possibility that they never will). But here’s a somewhat more measured (if linguistically jumbled) application of the phrase, made in response to the last citation above, by Paul Druckman, the chair of the World Benchmarking Alliance:

• … as Jingdong so rightly said before, the train has left the station. It just seems to have been going uphill a little, in its acceleration rather than downhill. But just moving on to advice, my advice is we need to drive better business behavior. Okay, and that’s right across the capital markets. When, comply with the standards, prepare for the legislation, yes, lead. Don’t wait for the legislation, prepare for it. Consider wider value towards evaluating impacts because that’s next. You know nature is the big force that’s coming forward, you know TNFD coming forward, which the ISSB will have to make decisions about in the near future. So we do need, don’t just comply, comply and think and follow what’s going on. All enroute to integrated thinking, all enroute to having a business and a whole capital market system that thinks right through these issues, not just how to.

But that was before the return of Trump, and the imposition of an era in which driving better business behavior and “considering wider value towards evaluating impacts” have been all but outlawed. When used in the context of sustainability reporting, the train/station phrase can be if anything counterproductive, implying a journey that’s already substantially realized; at the same time it seems distinctly rooted in anxiety, as if the speakers were seeking to reassure themselves as much as anyone else that this whole effort won’t just fall apart. Well, sadly for them and for all of us, the train is at some risk of being bombed out of existence. So where’s our armed resistance…?

This has been another in our periodic series, Great Cliches of IFRS.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.