From July 2027, anyone will be able to look up the sustainability report of any EU company in one place, for free. The European Single Access Point, or ESAP, is being built by the European Securities and Markets Authority under a 2023 regulation. The first phase of data collection began in July 2026, and the platform opens to the public by July 2027. Sustainability disclosures follow from January 2028, with full coverage by 2030. European Securities and Markets Authority
This is genuinely good news. Today a fund manager comparing two Swedish suppliers has to hunt through two national registers, two PDF reports and two different chart formats. ESAP replaces that with one searchable, machine readable database in every EU language. It adds no new reporting obligations, since everything on it is already public. Investors get comparability. Procurement teams get a way to screen suppliers. Journalists and NGOs get a starting point instead of a research project. europa
But a database is a distribution system, not a quality control system. It will publish whatever companies put into it, and what most companies put in is an estimate.
The problem
The problem sits in scope 3, the indirect emissions in a company's value chain. CDP found that supply chain emissions are on average 11.4 times higher than a company's own operational emissions, and in retail the ratio reaches 28 to 1. In its 2023 disclosure data, CDP and BCG put the figure at 26.
Whichever number you take, the conclusion is the same. For most companies, the emissions that matter are the ones outside the factory gate. CDP CDP
Most of those emissions are calculated using the spend-based method: take how much money was spent with a supplier, multiply by an industry average emission factor. It is fast and it requires nothing from the supplier. It is also close to blind. Two companies buying identical steel at different prices report different footprints. A company that negotiates a discount appears to cut emissions. A supplier that switches to green electricity shows up nowhere at all.
The gap is measurable. A UK review by certification body NQA compared more than 50 verified clients across 28 industry codes against national spend-based factors, and found that 77 percent had actual emissions lower than the factor suggested, by an average of 79 percent. NQA
The alternative is activity-based data: physical quantities from ERP and procurement systems, and emission factors tied to what was actually bought rather than what it cost. It is harder. It is also the only version of the number an investor can act on.
ESAP will make corporate climate data visible in a way it has never been in Europe. The next question is whether it is worth looking at. There is about a year and a half to fix that.