Sustainability assurance research is still in its early stages and many important questions remain unanswered.

According to Ulrike Thuerheimer (assistant professor in accounting at the University of Amsterdam) directions for future research include:

• How do financial statement and sustainability audits interact?

• What team characteristics matter?

• How do materiality concepts differ between the financial statement and sustainability audits?

• How does limited assurance differ from reasonable assurance concerning sustainability?

• How to measure the quality of sustainability reporting (and assurance), possibly with the help of AI?

• What is the impact of (changes in) European regulation?

• What are cross-country differences in what parties are allowed to provide sustainability assurance?

• How will the market and auditors react to future enforcement cases?

Ulrike underlines the importance of FAR in helping to get access to relevant data.

This video is an addition to Ulrike’s FARview podcast that was published last July: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsTz2AFlpSc

FAR also recently published a booklet with 5 summaries of interesting articles on sustainability assurance. Here’s a link to the pdf of the publication:

https://lnkd.in/eUCQnv6c

There is also a Dutch version available:

https://lnkd.in/eMc64NVK