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To help align Canada with the global climate and sustainability reporting baseline of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Sustainability Disclosure Standards, the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board (CSSB) issued the Canadian Sustainability Disclosure Standards (CSDS).

To likewise align your reporting with the quantitative and qualitative requirements of the CSDS, you can supplement your Sustainability Reporting workspace with additional templates and files:

• Templates to help document and collect stakeholder perspectives on the financial impact — or materiality — of sustainability topics on your company from Assessments and Reports
• The CSDS gap assessment spreadsheet, to record the results of the materiality assessment and identify gaps
• The Gap assessment results and visualization spreadsheet, to help track the gaps identified at-a-glance
• The CSDS datapoint accelerator spreadsheet, to identify datapoints related to the gaps identified and help ease the creation of metrics in Sustainability Program to resolve those gaps
• A CSDS section within your Factbook spreadsheet
• Supporting queries and reports to connect data across files

Note: Implementation services are required to set up these supplemental templates and files in your workspace; additional costs may apply. For details, contact your implementation partner.

Step 1. Enable CSDS in Explorer

The CSDS include:

• CSDS1: General requirements for disclosure of sustainability-related financial information
• CSDS2: Climate-related disclosures

To browse and search the content of these Standards, select Canadian Sustainability Disclosure Standards from the Properties panel in Sustainability Explorer.

To learn more, view Explore Canadian Sustainability Disclosure Standards.

Step 2. Assess topic materiality

To determine which Standards to disclose, you can use Assessments to collect stakeholders' perspectives and identify topics' financial materiality based on their risks and opportunities to your company and its bottom line. 

Tip: If your workspace also includes the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) add-on, you can use its double-materiality assessments and reports to determine the materiality of topics.

To enable this materiality assessment, provide the risks and opportunities (ROs) to assess, such as:

• Risks to your company's cash flow, or of employee turnover
• Opportunities to improve employee morale and combat corruption

In addition, provide:

• The workspace members to receive assessments
• Which of your company's entities to include in assessments
• The affected stakeholder groups — such as investors, auditors, and local authorities
• The areas of your company's value chain to assess

Workiva uses this information to implement these templates in Assessments.

Tip: When Workiva implements these templates, your company identifies which key stakeholders to consult for each topic's assessments.

After implementation:

1. From Reports , select the key stakeholders to receive each assessment:

   Assessment	Stakeholder assignment report
   1a. Topic collection	1. Topic collection assessment stakeholder assignment in the 1. Step A: Understanding the context folder
   1b. RO collection	1. RO collection assessment stakeholder assignment in the 2. Step B: Identification of ROs folder
   2. Financial materiality assessment	1. Assessments stakeholder assignment in the 3a. Materiality assessments folder
   3. RO materiality decision	1. Topic & RO decision assessment stakeholder assignment in the 3b. Materiality decision assessments folder
   4. Topic materiality decision	1. Topic & RO decision assessment stakeholder assignment in the 3b. Materiality decision assessments folder

2. From Assessments, use these templates to create and send assessments to collect stakeholders' perceptions on each topic's materiality. You can then gauge the materiality of topics based on the results of these assessments from Reports.

To learn more, view Assess materiality of Canadian Sustainability Disclosure Standards.

Step 3. Assess and resolve gaps in data collection

The supplemental templates include the CSDS gap assessment spreadsheet.

From this spreadsheet, you can choose which disclosure requirements and ROs to assess — such as based on your materiality assessment — and identify gaps in related data collection and reporting.

Tip: From the Gap assessment results and visualization spreadsheet, you can analyze the progress and results of your gap assessments, both in-depth and at a high-level.

To help reconcile any gaps identified, you can use the CSDS datapoint accelerator spreadsheet to align disclosure requirements with new or existing metrics in Sustainability Program. 

From these metrics, you can:

• Align values with corresponding content in Sustainability Explorer for the CSDS or Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) Standards.
• Upload PDFs of the full Standard as reference attachments to ease access to any formulas or tables required for reporting.
• Create tasks to assign workspace members to collect required values through metrics, Workiva Tasks, or connected source files.

Tip: To help comply with industry-specific reporting needs, the CSDS require the application of SASB Standards. To update the CSDS gap assessment spreadsheet with metric values that align with CSDS or SASB, click Refresh for the incoming connections from the Connections panel.

To learn more, view:

• Assess gaps for Canadian Sustainability Disclosure Standards
• Import metrics for gaps in Canadian Sustainability Disclosure Standards

Step 4. Create CSDS report

To disclose the values collected for your material topics, you can create a highly-designed CSDS report as a Document or Presentation. From your Factbook spreadsheet, you can use the CSDS section within the Framework indices to review your gap assessment and prepare disclosures to report. 

1. From the Step 1: CSDS scoping sheet, review the disclosures that apply to each RO, based on your gap assessment.
2. From the Step 2: CSDS analysis sheet, review the Sustainability Program metrics and ROs that align with each disclosure, based on your gap assessment.
3. From the Step 3. CSDS index sheet, use details about metric values to help prepare disclosures in reporting outputs:
   • In Response, use the values from each metric for your report, such as to prepare in the Performance tables section.
   • In Reference, enter how you refer to the disclosure requirement in your report, such as CSDS S2-13-(b).
   • In Note, enter any additional information about the value or disclosure requirement, such as for a footnote or general context.
4. From the Analysis: Metrics and framework index sheet, review any additional frameworks or standards from Sustainability Explorer that align with each metric.

To learn more, view Use Factbook as source for sustainability reporting.