Ask any small business owner whether sustainability matters to their business, and the overwhelming majority will say yes. Ask them whether they've actually published a sustainability report, and almost none of them have. That gap isn't apathy - it's a well-documented, measurable barrier problem, and the data on it is more specific than most people expect.
The paradox: high ambition, low execution
A global survey of SMEs conducted by Sage, in partnership with PwC and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), published for COP28 in November 2023, put precise numbers on this gap. 83% of SMEs say sustainability is important to their business - up from 76% the year before - and 58% say they're already making public commitments about it. Roughly 1 in 5 SMEs are what the study calls "highly engaged," actively talking about their sustainability impact externally, but still not formally reporting on it.
Against all of that stated ambition: just 7.7% of SMEs are actually undertaking sustainability reporting. Not 77% - 7.7%. That's the paradox this article is named for: over 92% of small businesses that say this matters to them still haven't put out a report.
Global SME sustainability reporting statistics
- 83%of SMEs say sustainability is important to their business, up from 76% in 2022.
- 7.7%of SMEs say they are actively undertaking sustainability reporting.
- 73%of SMEs are concerned about the upfront costs of reporting.
- 65%of SMEs describe current reporting standards as too complex.
- ~40%of business-sector greenhouse gas emissions in EU countries come from SMEs, per OECD estimates.
- ~50%of business-sector GHG emissions globally are estimated to come from SMEs, per the International Trade Centre.
Sources: Sage, in partnership with PwC and the International Chamber of Commerce, "Path for growth: Making sustainability reporting work for SMEs" (Nov 2023); OECD, "Fostering convergence in SME sustainability reporting: A background study" (Jan 2025), citing International Trade Centre (2021) for the global emissions estimate.
The 3 main roadblocks stopping small businesses from reporting
- 1
Sky-high upfront costs and platform fees
73% of SMEs cite upfront cost as their top concern - and it's a reasonable one. Enterprise ESG platforms are typically priced and contracted around continuous, year-round reporting for a large sustainability team, not a single annual report for a ten-person business.
- 2
Overwhelming framework complexity
65% describe existing reporting standards as too complex. Most sustainability frameworks - CSRD's ESRS included - were built for large, listed companies with dedicated compliance staff, and read that way: dense, open-ended, and unforgiving to a first-time filer.
- 3
Severe deficits in internal expertise and time
Beyond cost and complexity, the same research points to a third, harder-to-quantify barrier: most SMEs simply don't have anyone on staff whose job is sustainability reporting. The OECD's own analysis names this directly - limited resources, lack of expertise, and the complexity of data collection, compounded for businesses that also have to navigate multiple frameworks across different jurisdictions.
How the VSME framework is lowering the barriers to entry
This isn't an unaddressed problem. The OECD's January 2025 background study on SME sustainability reporting exists specifically to push convergence toward simpler, SME-appropriate frameworks - and names EFRAG's Voluntary standard for non-listed SMEs (VSME) as one of the leading examples already in use. The same report notes that 70% of SMEs see digital tools as having real potential to make reporting easier, and estimates that closing this gap could bring as many as 51 million more SMEs worldwide into active, measured reporting.
VSME's specific answer to the complexity problem is naming its disclosures directly instead of leaving the format open-ended - see our complete VSME reporting guide for the full breakdown. But a standard alone doesn't fix the cost and time barriers; that's a tooling problem, not a framework problem.
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Reportful·ESG was built directly against those two remaining barriers, not just the framework one:
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Because this data-collection problem is genuinely hard, traditional software built around continuous enterprise reporting doesn't fit a business that needs one report a year - see our deep-dive on the best carbon accounting software for SMEs to see how the industry itself is pivoting toward simpler, cheaper tools.
Break through the 92% statistic.
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