The Mirage of Abolishing CSDDD: Risk Doesn’t Disappear — It Shifts

Recently, forty-three European CEOs signed a petition to abolish the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), hoping it would ease their ESG burden.

But that belief is strategically short-sighted. Removing one regulation doesn’t remove the risk — it just narrows your visibility over an increasingly interconnected web of obligations.

ESG today isn’t a checklist. It’s a network of interdependent norms, where eliminating one node only increases exposure elsewhere.

Take the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR): it goes further than the CSDDD, requiring companies to prove — with verifiable data — that no deforestation occurred at any stage of their supply chain. Even if CSDDD vanished tomorrow, your due diligence obligations, and their financial impact, would remain.

The Strategic Lesson for Boards

Scrapping one regulation may look like simplification, but in practice it fragments compliance.

Without a coherent framework, companies face a maze of diverging ESG, privacy, and competition laws — multiplying costs, complexity, and uncertainty. The real challenge isn’t avoiding one rule; it’s understanding how they all connect.

Boards that treat ESG as a regulatory patchwork risk misallocating resources — focusing on the visible while overlooking the material. What’s needed is not less due diligence, but smarter due diligence: grounded in evidence, coherence, and prioritization.

From Compliance to Clarity

At GlisRisk, we help organizations build that foundation.

Our platform gives boards a holistic view of non-financial risks — from ESG to privacy, antitrust, and beyond — quantifying both gross and net risk so leaders can prioritize investments where they matter most.

Because only when you see the full picture can you make informed, strategic choices — turning compliance into competitive advantage.

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