ISSB Sustainability Disclosure Standards Implementation Training Course

Course overview

Organisations adopting IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards face a practical reporting challenge: turning dispersed environmental, safety, workforce, governance and climate information into decision-useful disclosures that meet IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 requirements. Sustainability teams must establish ownership, define reporting boundaries, connect sustainability risks with enterprise risk management, calculate appropriate metrics, and produce evidence that can withstand investor, board and assurance scrutiny. This course addresses the implementation work behind the standards rather than treating ISSB as a high-level reporting topic.

Participants learn a structured method for applying IFRS S1 General Requirements for Disclosure of Sustainability-related Financial Information and IFRS S2 Climate-related Disclosures. They map sustainability-related risks and opportunities, apply the four core content areas of governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets, identify material information using an investor-focused lens, and build disclosure-ready data requirements. The programme also covers financed and operational emissions boundaries, scenario analysis inputs, cross-referencing with SASB Standards, GHG Protocol calculations, transition-plan disclosures, internal controls, and assurance preparation.

Delivery combines instructor explanation with worked disclosures, gap-assessment templates, peer review and case-based workshops. Participants use a realistic company case to construct an ISSB implementation roadmap, disclosure gap register, data-owner matrix, metric catalogue and draft disclosure architecture. They leave with an applied implementation pack that can be adapted for their own organisation, along with a certificate on completion.

The course is designed for sustainability, ESG, finance, risk, internal audit and reporting professionals who already contribute to corporate reporting or environmental performance management and need to lead, review or support an ISSB-aligned reporting programme.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Interpret IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 disclosure requirements using the governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets structure
• Conduct an ISSB disclosure gap assessment against an existing sustainability report, annual report, or internal reporting pack
• Define sustainability-related risk and opportunity reporting boundaries linked to enterprise value and financial effects
• Build a materiality assessment workflow that identifies decision-useful sustainability information for primary users of general-purpose financial reports
• Develop a climate metrics catalogue covering Scope 1, Scope 2, and relevant Scope 3 greenhouse-gas emissions
• Create a data-owner matrix and evidence trail for ISSB metrics, targets, assumptions, and narrative disclosures
• Draft IFRS S2 climate-risk, scenario-analysis, transition-plan, and resilience disclosure content
• Produce a phased ISSB implementation roadmap with governance actions, control activities, milestones, and reporting deliverables

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Sustainability and ESG Managers — who must convert ESG programmes and datasets into investor-focused ISSB disclosures
• Corporate Reporting Managers — who need to integrate sustainability-related financial information with annual reporting processes
• Finance Managers and Controllers — who are responsible for reporting controls, financial-effects analysis, and management sign-off
• Climate and Environmental Managers — who own emissions inventories, climate targets, and operational environmental data
• Risk Managers — who must connect sustainability-related risks and opportunities to enterprise risk management
• Internal Audit and Assurance Professionals — who need to assess evidence, controls, data lineage, and disclosure readiness

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have working familiarity with corporate sustainability, ESG, climate, environmental, risk, finance, or annual-reporting processes. Experience reading a sustainability report, greenhouse-gas inventory, risk register, or annual report is helpful, as is basic awareness of Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions. Participants should be comfortable reviewing tables and working with Microsoft Excel. Prior use of IFRS S1, IFRS S2, SASB Standards, formal scenario analysis, assurance software, or sustainability reporting platforms is not required. This is an intermediate implementation course, not an accounting qualification or a carbon-footprinting course from first principles.

Training methodology

The instructor uses IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 extracts, annotated disclosure examples, a realistic multi-site company case, and guided Excel-based templates. Short technical sessions establish the requirements; participants then work in groups to classify risks, assess disclosure gaps, define metrics, assign data ownership, and critique draft disclosures. Facilitated reviews compare alternative implementation decisions and expose common reporting weaknesses. On the final day, each participant converts the case approach into an organisation-specific 90-day action plan and receives structured instructor feedback.

Course outline

Day 1: ISSB architecture and implementation baseline

• ISSB purpose, scope and relationship to general-purpose financial reporting
• IFRS S1 general requirements and sustainability-related financial information
• IFRS S2 climate-related disclosure requirements and application structure
• The four core content areas: governance, strategy, risk management, metrics and targets
• Enterprise value, primary users and decision-useful information
• Reporting entity, reporting period, connected information and comparative information
• ISSB implementation lifecycle from diagnostic through publication and assurance

Workshop: Participants complete an ISSB readiness diagnostic for the case organisation and produce a prioritised gap register.

Day 2: Materiality, governance and risk integration

• Identifying sustainability-related risks and opportunities under IFRS S1
• Investor-focused materiality and reasonable-and-supportable information
• Linking sustainability risks to enterprise risk management processes
• Governance disclosures for board oversight and management responsibilities
• Value-chain considerations, reporting boundaries and data dependencies
• Current and anticipated financial effects of sustainability-related risks
• Using SASB Standards to identify industry-based disclosure topics and metrics

Workshop: Teams map material sustainability-related risks and opportunities to governance owners, risk-register entries and required disclosures.

Day 3: Climate disclosure data and metrics

• IFRS S2 climate-risk categories: physical risks and transition risks
• GHG Protocol organisational boundaries and operational control approaches
• Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions calculations and location-based versus market-based reporting
• Scope 3 screening, category selection and estimation-method documentation
• Climate-related targets, base years, recalculation policies and performance tracking
• Industry-based metrics, cross-industry metric categories and metric definitions
• Metric catalogues, data lineage, source evidence and calculation-control design

Workshop: Participants build a climate metric catalogue and data-owner matrix for the case organisation's emissions and target disclosures.

Day 4: Strategy, resilience and disclosure drafting

• Climate scenario analysis objectives, assumptions, time horizons and limitations
• Assessing climate resilience in strategy and business-model disclosures
• Transition-plan components, decarbonisation levers and capital-allocation implications
• Quantifying current and anticipated financial effects with appropriate uncertainty explanations
• Drafting governance, strategy and risk-management disclosures from source evidence
• Cross-referencing, connected information and consistency with financial statements
• Disclosure quality review for completeness, specificity, balance and traceability

Workshop: Participants draft and peer-review an IFRS S2 climate strategy and resilience disclosure using a structured quality checklist.

Day 5: Controls, assurance readiness and implementation planning

• Sustainability reporting governance, reporting calendar and approval workflows
• Internal controls over sustainability reporting and management review controls
• Evidence retention, audit trails and documentation of estimates and assumptions
• Limited-assurance readiness and common assurance evidence requests
• ISSB gap-remediation prioritisation using impact, effort and reporting-risk criteria
• Technology requirements for data collection, consolidation and version control
• Ninety-day implementation plans, milestones, accountabilities and executive reporting

Workshop: Each participant produces a 90-day ISSB implementation roadmap with priority actions, owners, control improvements and escalation points.

Tools & standards covered

IFRS S1 General Requirements for Disclosure of Sustainability-related Financial Information, IFRS S2 Climate-related Disclosures, GHG Protocol Corporate Standard, Microsoft Excel

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions