The Financial Services Commission has moved the announcement of its final ESG (sustainability) disclosure roadmap to early May. The plan to finalize it within April has been pushed back by nearly a month, and this became known between April 27 and 28. A senior government official is said to have explained on April 28 that more time was needed for last-minute coordination. What the final plan contains will become clear when it is announced.
Accounts differ on the reason for the delay. On one side, it is noted that a large number of written opinions came in from the National Pension Service, companies such as POSCO, the investment industry and academia, which extended the review. On the other side, the explanation is that policy coordination between the presidential office and the Financial Services Commission is running into difficulty in the final stretch. Either way, an April finalization has fallen through.
This is the second time the schedule has slipped this year. In its December 2025 work report, the Financial Services Commission set the first quarter of 2026 as the time for preparing ESG disclosure standards and the roadmap. It then pushed the release date back once to April after a February 2026 meeting of the ESG Finance Task Force, and that April has now moved to May.
The core of the draft released in February 2026 is a method of applying the rules in stages, dividing the companies covered by size of assets. The starting line is KOSPI (securities market) listed companies with consolidated total assets of 30 trillion won or more, and disclosure will take place from 2028. An explanation was also given that because the rules take effect in stages from the 2027 fiscal year, the actual reports will come out in 2028. The draft also contained a plan to widen coverage in 2029 to companies with consolidated total assets of 10 trillion won or more, though there are counterarguments that the expansion timeline is in effect missing.
In terms of the number of companies covered, the scale is clear. By the count of the Korea Sustainability Investing Forum (KOSIF), there are 58 KOSPI-listed companies with consolidated total assets of 30 trillion won or more, about 7% of all listed companies. About half of them were counted as financial companies (as of April 27, 2026). The draft chose a method of running their disclosures as exchange disclosures at first, then moving them to statutory disclosures under the Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act once the system settles in.
Greenhouse gas emissions across the supply chain (Scope 3) is written in for introduction in 2031. Compared with 2028, the date of the first disclosures, that is three years later. Companies are asking that grace periods and exemptions be widened for Scope 3 and for items beyond climate disclosure, saying they need to keep pace with regulations in major countries abroad.
Demands on the other side point in the opposite direction. The National Pension Service submitted a written opinion to the Financial Services Commission in March 2026, calling for the threshold to be lowered to consolidated total assets of 2 trillion won or more and for a statutory disclosure format to be applied from the first stage of the system. The 2 trillion won threshold matches the starting line for phased mandatory disclosure that financial authorities presented in their 2021 comprehensive plan to improve the corporate disclosure system.
The Korea Institute for Economic Reform, the Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice, the National Pension Climate Action, the Iroum Foundation, the People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy and the Korea Federation for Environmental Movements held a press conference on the morning of April 27 in front of the presidential office in Seoul. They put into their demands an immediate switch to statutory disclosure through an amendment to the Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act, an expansion of the mandate to companies with 2 trillion won or more in assets, mandatory sustainability disclosure covering environmental and social matters as a whole, and a stated roadmap for the double materiality principle and third-party assurance, and delivered them to the presidential office.
Related legislation is also piling up in the National Assembly. By the count of the National Assembly Budget Office, six amendments to the Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act connected to ESG disclosure have been introduced in the 22nd National Assembly and are pending in the relevant standing committee (as of April 27, 2026). An amendment introduced on April 21 by People Power Party Rep. Lee Hun-seung is among them, and there are accounts that it contains a switch to statutory disclosure alongside accounts that it stipulates a mandatory separate sustainability report.
Apart from the design of the system, practical support is under way. The Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment will release a guide to calculating Scope 3 emissions tailored to the steel and petrochemical industries. The government has been publishing such guides in sequence for major export industries since 2023, and the semiconductor and display industries were covered earlier.
The same ministry will also run an ESG specialist training program from May through November. The program is divided into basic, comprehensive and advanced levels, and the advanced level includes hands-on practice in Scope 1, 2 and 3 calculation based on the GHG Protocol, CBAM response and supply chain due diligence response.
Both accounts share the observation that the final plan will be stronger than the draft, but that is only a forecast and not a settled fact. There is also talk that the government is reviewing a plan to leave the original 30 trillion won 2028 provision as it is while writing in a more detailed year-by-year expansion timeline. For listed companies, the variables that determine compliance costs are, in the end, when it starts, up to what size it reaches, and which items it covers. The document with those three written in will come out early next month.
