"The regulatory scope is shrinking on one hand," said Daniel-Sascha Roth, Head of ESG System and Media Management, speaking at a recent Datamaran webinar on the real ESG regulatory landscape. "But the expectation horizon is still expanding."
It is a disconnect that is playing out inside organizations everywhere. And for the teams responsible for staying on top of it, the stakes have never been higher.
A landscape that refuses to simplify
Datamaran's own analysis confirms what practitioners are feeling on the ground. Regulatory pressure across environmental, social and governance topics increased dramatically between 2024 and 2025, a trend that shows no sign of reversing in 2026.
Climate and emissions rules, sustainability reporting requirements, AI regulation, human rights due diligence and circular economy policy are all accelerating — across jurisdictions that are not always aligned.
For companies operating globally, this creates a thousand-piece puzzle to solve every day.
The Omnibus package may have simplified things on paper, but for large multinationals it has concentrated regulatory pressure rather than relieved it. Add the uneven pace of CSRD transposition across EU member states, the ongoing ISSB adoption curve and diverging capital market expectations, and the picture that emerges is not simplification — it is rising complexity with diminishing clarity.
Marientina Laina, Head of ESG Compliance at NTT data, put it plainly: "We're going through what feels like a dark phase in sustainability and ESG. While in practice, we are being very busy."
The challenge of keeping up — and coordinating internally
When Datamaran surveyed sustainability leaders on the biggest external forces shaping their strategy, 83% named regulatory change. Yet most organizations are still monitoring that change with processes built for a simpler era — a mix of newsletters, external advisors and internal effort that doesn't scale.
Both Roth and Laina described the moment they recognized a more structured approach was necessary. For Roth, it was the volume and ambiguity of CSRD data points — over 1,000 depending on the outcome of the double materiality assessment — and the speed mismatch between regulation, capital markets and data providers. "We simply needed some help to digest the complexity," Roth said.
For Laina, it was both the scale of global monitoring required and the absence of a community to lean on. "I felt overwhelmed. I felt a little bit lonely as well," she said. Working with Datamaran changed that — providing not just a platform, but expert support and a peer network. "Every time there is a question around interpretation, there is always someone there."
Internally, both organizations have moved toward a model of orchestrated cross-functional ownership. Rather than placing all responsibility with the sustainability team, the goal is to bring legal, risk, compliance, finance and internal audit into a structured, ongoing collaboration — with clear terms of reference and shared accountability. "There has to be one who is in charge of orchestrating all of this," Roth said. "But the reality is, it's a complex team effort."
The best practice: Keep moving
The clearest message from both practitioners was not to wait for regulatory certainty before acting. "If we put efforts on pause until we have full clarity, it's not going to work to our benefit,"Laina said. The regulatory puzzle will keep shifting. The organizations that will manage it best are those that build continuous monitoring into the fabric of how they operate — not as a project, but as a business process.
Datamaran's Regulatory Monitoring product is built for exactly this moment. It serves organizations that need clear visibility on evolving policies and rules across their global operations — without needing to label themselves sustainability leaders to justify the investment. "We're seeing strong traction from companies that don't want to be labelled as 'sustainability leaders' but still need to understand where the regulatory environment is going,"said Marjella Lecourt-Alma, CEO and Co-Founder of Datamaran.
See how Datamaran can scale regulatory monitoring for your company.
https://datamaran-lp.webflow.io/regulatory-monitoring https://hubs.la/Q047vKHZ0
