CSRD is coming: what engineering teams should prepare now

Sustainability reporting used to live entirely in the finance and communications functions. With the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the numbers increasingly need to come from engineering — and they need to hold up to audit.

Digital emissions enter the report

Cloud and software footprints are becoming a line item, not a footnote. If your organisation reports under CSRD, someone will eventually ask what your systems emit — and "we are not sure" is not an acceptable answer to an auditor.

Start instrumenting before you are asked

• Tag workloads so emissions can be attributed
• Capture consistent energy telemetry over time
• Keep an audit trail of methodology and assumptions
• Align on SCI so numbers are comparable

The teams that instrument early will report calmly. The rest will scramble.

The good news: the same instrumentation that satisfies a regulator also surfaces the inefficiencies worth fixing. Compliance and optimisation, for once, pull in the same direction.