An Architecture for General-purpose Financial Reporting – The Development of ISSB Sustainability Disclosure Standards

In 2023 the IFRS Foundation published its first two IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards. Those standards were guided by an architecture, or blueprint, that I developed for a comprehensive set of reporting requirements that would ensure that sustainability-related disclosures would become part of mainstream financial reporting. My architecture was developed to be consistent with the architecture for IFRS Accounting Standards, emphasising the connections between sustainability information and the financial statements. Although the products of this architecture, the standards, are in the public domain the architecture itself has not been documented or published previously. The purpose of this paper is to fill that gap, describing the architecture, how it was developed and what influenced it. The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) followed many, but not all, of the design principles