POLICY & REGULATION · 8 min read
Somebody Reads the Sustainability Statement. Fewer Than One in Five Are Investors
The first behavioural evidence on Europe’s newly mandatory sustainability statements answers the question their critics keep asking. In eight large companies’ online reports, the statements were read about as often as the financial statements, and for longer. But their readers were mostly employees, sustainability specialists and business partners, and those readers rarely crossed into the financials. Sri Lanka has adopted a standard written for investors and lenders that demands that connection.
By the ESGNexus Editorial Team · October 2026 · Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
KEY TAKEAWAYS
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The standing complaint about mandatory sustainability reporting has two halves: it costs a great deal to produce, and nobody reads it. The first half is easy to measure. Until this year, nobody had tested the second half against the new European statements. Now someone has.
In a paper published on 10 March 2026 in Accounting and Business Research, Lea Hagemeier and Maximilian A. Müller of the University of Cologne analysed web-tracking data from the online annual reports of eight large European companies that carried their first sustainability statements under the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The authors describe it as the first systematic evidence on revealed demand for these newly mandated disclosures. That means not what readers say they want when surveyed, but what they actually opened, how long they spent on it, and where they went next.
The statements are read. These eight reports were read as much as the financial statements, and for longer. They were not read mainly by investors.
What the Researchers Could See
The eight companies published their 2024 annual reports as navigable websites, and Matomo, an open-source analytics tool, logged every page view for three months after publication. After excluding visits that touched only landing or download pages, the sample comprises 112,824 visits and 412,067 page views from 112,470 unique visitors. Six of the companies are headquartered in Germany, one in Austria and one in Portugal. Six are large-capitalisation companies, and none is a bank or an insurer. Nexxar provided the web-analytics data; the German Research Foundation and Stiftung Mercator funded the research.
Because the page views cluster inside eight reports, the authors test every difference company by company rather than visit by visit, using methods built for small samples. That makes the findings conservative by construction. Several differences that look large do not pass the authors’ tests, and the table below says which do.
| Measure (average of eight reports) | Sustainability statement | Financial sections |
| Share of page views | 38.1% | 37.0% |
| Share of report content (PDF pages) | 45.0% | 42.0% |
| Average time per visit | 2 min 58 s | 2 min 25 s |
| Readers from the company’s home country | 40.6% | 34.5% |
| Readers from outside Europe | 28.9% | 36.9% |
| Next page view stays in the same section | 90.4% | 86.1% |
Source: Hagemeier and Müller (2026), Tables 2, 3, 6, 8 and 9. The 1.1-point difference in page-view share is not statistically significant. The time-per-visit difference (about 34 seconds, p = 0.01) and the home-country and non-European differences (p = 0.04 and p = 0.02) are significant. The stay-in-section difference is marginal (p = 0.09).
Two features of that table matter more than the headline parity. First, sustainability traffic was never marginal. In the report where it fared worst, the sustainability statement still drew 21.5% of page views and outdrew the financial sections in five of the eight. Second, its readership was more local: more readers from the company’s own country, fewer from outside Europe. The financial statements travel to global capital markets. On this evidence, the sustainability statement is read closer to home.
Who Was Reading
Four of the eight companies ran a voluntary pop-up survey asking visitors who they were. It is the closest thing yet to a profile of the sustainability statement’s audience, and it should be read with the authors’ own caution: respondents are a self-selected subset, not necessarily representative of all visitors, and the paper does not report how many there were.
| Reader group | Sustainability statement | Financial sections |
| Employees | 32.6% | 33.4% |
| Investors (analysts, retail and institutional) | 18.3% | 37.8% |
| Sustainability experts | 18.1% | 1.7% |
| Business partners (customers, suppliers, consumers) | 13.1% | 12.4% |
| Job applicants and students | 13.1% | 11.0% |
| Public interest (NGOs, federations, politics, journalists) | 4.9% | 3.8% |
Source: Hagemeier and Müller (2026), Table 10. Survey respondents in four of the eight reports, equal-weighted across companies; each column sums to 100%. The number of respondents is not reported.
Investors are not absent. They are fewer than one in five of those who identified themselves in the sustainability statement, and less than half their share in the financial sections. The largest group is the company’s own workforce, which accounts for roughly a third of respondents across every section of the report. Within the statement, the pattern sharpens by topic. Employees accounted for 48.7% of respondents on the social pages, while investors accounted for 9.5%. Sustainability experts were 23.9% of respondents on the environmental pages.
Attention followed the substance. Among the topic-specific disclosures, climate change and the company’s own workforce drew the most visits and reading time; governance pages drew 6.5% of visits within the statement. None of this is entirely new. An earlier study of ten FTSE 350 companies’ websites, as Hagemeier and Müller summarise, found that sustainability content drew only a small share of traffic, and that most requests came from employees, private individuals, or consultants rather than professional investors. In these eight mandatory reports, the sustainability statement drew as much traffic as the financials.
The Readers Did Not Cross Over
For a preparer, the sharpest finding is not who read but where they went next. Of the page views that followed a financial page, 5.6% went into the sustainability statement. Of those that followed a sustainability page, 4.8% went to the financial sections, and 90.4% stayed inside the statement. The authors conclude directly:
| Formal integration at the report level does not necessarily translate into integrated usage by readers. — Lea Hagemeier and Maximilian A. Müller, Accounting and Business Research, 2026 |
Under the CSRD, the sustainability statement is included in the management report alongside the financial statements and is subject to assurance. Placing the two in one document did not lead readers to use them together.
Why This Lands Harder in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka chose a different standard, written for a different audience. SLFRS S1 and SLFRS S2 incorporate the International Sustainability Standards Board’s IFRS S1 and IFRS S2. According to the IFRS Foundation’s jurisdictional profile, they apply to the 100 largest companies on the Colombo Stock Exchange by market capitalisation for annual reporting periods starting on or after 1 January 2025, to Main Board companies from 1 January 2026, and to most other listed companies from 2027. ESGNexus has already graded several of the first mandatory filings, including those of Hemas, HNB and Sampath Bank.
IFRS S1 states plainly whom it serves. Its objective is to provide information useful to “primary users of general purpose financial reports”, and its glossary defines those users as existing and potential investors, lenders, and other creditors. The European standards behind the statements in the Cologne study are built differently. The ESRS require a double-materiality assessment, so a topic is reported if it matters to the company’s finances or if the company has a significant impact on people or the environment. They are written, by design, for a wider audience.
That creates a tension a Sri Lankan board should recognise. If European readers behave this way when the standard is written with them in mind, a Sri Lankan sustainability statement written for investors and lenders is likely to be read by many people it was not written for, its own employees above all. That is an inference, not a finding. It is the most useful question the study raises for this market, and ESGNexus has found no measurement of the answer here.
The second tension is connectivity. Paragraph 21 of IFRS S1 requires a company to provide information that lets users understand the connections across its sustainability-related disclosures and its other general purpose financial reports, “such as its related financial statements”. The Cologne evidence suggests that this connection is precisely the step readers do not take unprompted. A requirement can be satisfied during drafting yet still fail during reading.
What the Study Cannot Tell a Sri Lankan Preparer
- Eight companies is a small sample, and these eight are unusual: large, visible, mostly German-speaking, and early adopters of fully online reports. The authors caution against generalising to smaller companies, later reporters or simpler formats.
- Only the web versions were measured. If investors read the PDF and go straight to the financial statements, the study understates their demand for financial information, a limitation the authors state themselves.
- It covers the first year of a new regime, when curiosity may have run unusually high.
- The reader survey covers four companies, is voluntary, and has no reported sample size.
- The statements were prepared under the ESRS, not SLFRS. Whether a statement written for investors attracts the same audience is untested.
- ESGNexus found no published evidence on who reads Sri Lankan annual or sustainability reports. The data may already exist in the web analytics of companies that publish an online report.
What to Do Now
1. Find out who reads yours. Any company that publishes an online annual report already has the tools used in this study. Page views, time on page, entry pages, and visitor country are standard web analytics metrics, whereas the study’s audience data came from a single pop-up question. The first seasons of mandatory reporting are the right time to start counting.
2. Write the own-workforce and climate pages for the people who open them. In the study, these were the most-read topics, and employees were the largest audience on the social pages. SLFRS S1 decides what must be disclosed; the reader decides whether it is understood. Writing these pages plainly is not a concession; they are where the attention goes.
3. Build the connection into the navigation, not only the text. Paragraph 21 of IFRS S1 asks for connected information, and readers did not follow the connection on their own. Explicit links between the climate disclosures and the related notes in the financial statements, and vice versa, are the cheapest way to make the requirement work in practice.
4. Do not write off the investor audience. Investors were fewer than one in five respondents, not none, and those who read the PDF were not counted. The investor-focused standard remains the legal test of the statement. The evidence shows that investors are not the whole audience.
ESGNexus grades Sri Lankan SLFRS S1 and S2 filings, company by company, for completeness against the standards. The question this study raises, who actually reads those filings, is that ne ESGNexus has not yet seen a Sri Lankan company answer publicly. We will report on the first that does.
Sources & Further Reading
Hagemeier, L. and Müller, M.A., “Demand for sustainability disclosures: evidence from web-tracking data of CSRD reports”, Accounting and Business Research, 56(3), 365–397, published online 10 March 2026, open access (CC BY 4.0) — doi.org/10.1080/00014788.2026.2631933
IFRS Foundation, “IFRS S1 General Requirements for Disclosure of Sustainability-related Financial Information”, June 2023, paragraphs 1, 21, 60–61 and Appendix A — ifrs.org
IFRS Foundation, “IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards: Jurisdictional Profile, Sri Lanka”, updated 12 June 2025 — ifrs.org
Related ESGNexus analysis: Sri Lanka’s Mandatory Sustainability Reporting Is Here (16 June 2026); SLFRS S1 vs SLFRS S2: A Plain-English Guide for Sri Lankan Finance Teams (16 June 2026); Revised ESRS: What EU Cuts Mean for SL Exporters (2 August 2026).
| About ESGNexus ESGNexus is Sri Lanka’s independent platform for ESG, CSR, and sustainability intelligence. We track company-level ESG performance, regulatory developments, and sustainability data across Sri Lanka’s listed companies, large unlisted corporates, and state-owned enterprises. All editorial content is independently produced. Sponsored content is clearly labelled. |
Data disclaimer: Information in this article is sourced from publicly available documents. ESGNexus does not independently verify company disclosures. Errors and omissions excepted.