Many companies have been dealing with the topic of sustainability and CSR for decades. For some years now, companies have also been reporting on their CSR activities and the biggest risks associated with their business activities in the management report or separate sustainability reports. Based on a directive at EU level, the CSR Directive Implementation Act (CSR-RUG) came into force in Germany in April 2017. The law aims to make existing reports more comparable and to encourage companies that have not yet reported to do so. Around 500 large and capital market-oriented companies in Germany are covered by the new regulation. The 2017 fiscal year was the first year in Germany that had to be reported under the new law. As the reports were very varied and all participants had different experiences with the new regulation, Raphael Max (Research Associate at the Peter Loescher Chair of Business Ethics and Global Governance) organized a Round Table in cooperation with the Strategic Sustainability Management Team at Munich Airport to exchange the various experiences and challenges for the upcoming reports. These questions were discussed by around 30 representatives from business (including KPMG, BASF, Airbus, Siemens, Audi, Allianz, ProSiebenSat.1 and Osram), science (TUM, KU Ingolstadt and the University of Regensburg) and Dr. Lukas Köhler (FDP, Member of Deutscher Bundestag for Munich West/Mitte) as representative of politics.

Exemplary questions were:

• What were the experiences of the companies during the first implementation of the new CSR-RUG?
• Which provisions of the legislator go too far and which topics should the legislator formulate more clearly?
• How should CSR reporting develop in the long term?

The experience values were very different and led to a lively discussion. All participants agreed that the CSR-RUG has led to a broader public perception of the topic and has sensitised both management boards and supervisory boards to the need for sustainable corporate management. In a lecture, Prof. Christoph Lütge (holder of the Peter Loescher Chair for Business Ethics and Global Governance of the TUM) also drew attention to the necessary anchoring of sustainable corporate management in corporate governance.

Due to the CSR-RUG, the topic of sustainability has reached the center of many decisions of large companies. In the future, every company will no longer be able to ignore the question of how it deals with employee concerns, respect for human rights in the entire supply chain, environmental concerns or social challenges.