GRI, IFRS S1/S2, TCFD, SEDG — Which One Do You Actually Need?

GRI. IFRS S1. IFRS S2. TCFD. NSRF. i-ESG. SEDG.

If you've tried to figure out what ESG reporting actually requires of you, you've probably hit this wall — a pile of acronyms, no clear sense of which ones apply to a company your size, and no time to become an expert in all of them just to find out.

You're not imagining the confusion. Malaysia's own SME association has said the same thing publicly: cost, expertise, and confusion are the three biggest barriers holding SMEs back — and that guidance across different agencies often isn't well aligned. Most Malaysian SMEs are still at an early, ad hoc stage with ESG, not because they don't care, but because nobody's told them clearly which framework is actually theirs.

So here's the short version.

You don't need most of these

TCFD was formally folded into a newer standard back in 2023, so it's no longer something you'd track on its own. If anything you're reading still tells you to "align with TCFD," that's likely outdated language for something that now lives inside IFRS S2 instead. For a Malaysian SME, this generally isn't something you need to engage with separately.

IFRS S1 and S2 are the current global baseline — but they're mandatory for Bursa-listed companies, rolling out in phases from 2025 through 2027. Unless your company is listed, or a large non-listed company that falls within the phased scope, this generally isn't a direct requirement for you at this stage.

GRI is the deep, detailed encyclopedia of sustainability reporting — hundreds of pages, dozens of specific disclosures, built for large companies with dedicated sustainability teams. It's genuinely useful, but it's not sized for a company being run by two or three people.

NSRF and i-ESG are Malaysia's national umbrella policies — the architecture regulators use to organise all of this. Worth knowing they exist, since they're often what's behind the pressure you feel from larger customers, but they're generally not something an SME fills out directly.

The one that's actually yours

SEDG — the Simplified ESG Disclosure Guide — is different. It was built by Capital Markets Malaysia specifically because SMEs kept running into exactly the wall you just hit: too many frameworks, none of them sized right. SEDG takes the same underlying ideas that GRI and IFRS use — how much you emit, how you treat your workers, how your business is governed — and narrows them down to a defined, manageable set of disclosures built for a company your size.

Here's the part worth knowing: SEDG isn't disconnected from the "real" frameworks. It's built to align with several of them at once — GRI, the ISSB standards behind IFRS S1/S2, and Bursa's own Listing Requirements — just narrowed down to what fits a company your size. So when you complete a SEDG report, you're not doing something separate from what the bigger frameworks measure. You're doing a right-sized version of the same thing.

What this means practically

If someone — a customer, a bank, a tender document — asks for your "ESG data" without specifying a framework, SEDG is almost always the right answer to reach for. It's the one built for exactly your situation: not listed, not required by law, but increasingly asked to show something real.

For most Malaysian SMEs, that means you likely won't need to learn GRI's full methodology, track IFRS S2's climate disclosure requirements yourself, or work out what happened to TCFD. You need one framework that's already built to fit your situation, with a tool designed to walk you through it.

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ESG-lah is a self-guided ESG reporting platform for Malaysian SMEs, built in accordance with the Simplified ESG Disclosure Guide (SEDG). Free to start — upgrade only if you need advanced features.

Sources: Capital Markets Malaysia — Simplified ESG Disclosure Guide; IFRS Foundation — TCFD consolidation into IFRS S2 (October 2023); Securities Commission Malaysia — National Sustainability Reporting Framework; Malaysian SME Association (SAMENTA) public commentary on ESG compliance barriers.