The TCFD No Longer Exists. Here Is What You Report Against Now

A great deal of climate reporting guidance still describes the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures as a live framework with a forward-looking roadmap. It is not. The TCFD was disbanded on 12 October 2023, and a finance team that says it reports "against TCFD" in 2026 is describing something that no longer exists as a body, even though the substance of what it asks for survives almost intact somewhere else.

What actually happened, and when

The Task Force's own site records it plainly: "Concurrent with the release of its 2023 status report on October 12, 2023, the TCFD has fulfilled its remit and disbanded." The site itself notes that it would no longer be updated or monitored from November 2023, and the Task Force's final status report carries a timeline entry reading simply "TCFD Disbanded", describing itself as the Task Force's last status report.

Responsibility for monitoring companies' climate-related disclosures passed to the IFRS Foundation, through the International Sustainability Standards Board. Worth noting a small divergence in the primary sources if you are writing about this: the Financial Stability Board's announcement says the monitoring role transferred to the ISSB, while the IFRS Foundation's own release says the Foundation would take it over. Both are primary and neither is wrong, so the safe formulation is "the IFRS Foundation, through the ISSB".

The four pillars survived

The architecture everyone learned did not disappear. Governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets are the four content areas of the ISSB standards, and the IFRS Foundation states the relationship in strong terms: the requirements in IFRS S2 are "consistent with the four core recommendations and eleven recommended disclosures published by the TCFD", and a company applying IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 "will meet the TCFD recommendations as the recommendations are fully incorporated into the ISSB Standards".

So the four pillars are not a legacy of a dead framework. They are the live structure, under new ownership. The practical consequence is that a company applying IFRS S2 does not need to apply the TCFD recommendations separately, and the IFRS Foundation says so directly.

IFRS S2 also goes further than the TCFD did, in three identified respects: industry-based metrics, disclosure of the planned use of carbon credits, and financed emissions. A team migrating a TCFD report across should expect to add, not merely relabel.

One attribution point for anyone citing this. The strong "fully incorporated" wording comes from the IFRS Foundation's web pages on the ISSB and TCFD, not from its formal comparison document, which states consistency and organises its tables under the four TCFD headings without asserting identical architecture. The comparison document is nonetheless the useful artefact, because it was republished in February 2026 — so this is a current position rather than a 2023 one.

Which raises the harder question: who actually has to do any of it?

IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 were issued in June 2023 and are effective for annual reporting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2024. That phrasing misleads people, because an effective date is not an obligation. The standards bind a company only where its jurisdiction has made them law, or where the company chooses to apply them.

The IFRS Foundation is explicit: "The decision to adopt or otherwise use ISSB Standards is a sovereign decision", and adoption "is understood as requiring regulatory or legal action by a jurisdiction", with competence resting in most cases with capital market authorities and securities regulators.

The adoption figure is also routinely overstated. The IFRS Foundation's own careful wording, as at June 2026, is that over 40 jurisdictions have "decided to use or are taking steps to introduce ISSB Standards". That is not the same as forty jurisdictions having adopted them, and the Foundation does not claim it is. Anyone writing "40 countries have adopted the ISSB standards" has flattened a deliberately hedged sentence into a false one.

Several first-year reliefs are worth knowing because they change what a first report has to contain: a company may disclose only climate-related information in year one, need not provide comparatives in the first annual reporting period, may publish sustainability disclosures after the related financial statements within defined limits, and is not required to disclose Scope 3 emissions in the first year it applies IFRS S2.

The same mistake is about to be made again, with nature

The nature equivalent is where the next round of confusion is forming. The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures remains the framework in force, voluntary, with fourteen recommended disclosures across four pillars. Note that its second pillar is "risk and impact management" rather than simply "risk management" — the addition reflects a double-materiality view the ISSB standards do not take.

The ISSB has moved into nature-related standard-setting drawing on TNFD's work, and published an exposure draft on 22 October 2026 with comments closing on 19 February 2027. Two things about it are already being misreported. It is a draft, not a standard. And it is proposed as a Practice Statement, where "a company is not required to comply with a Practice Statement to state compliance with ISSB Standards" — so even if finalised as drafted, it would not carry the force that IFRS S2 does.

What to change in practice

Three things. Stop describing TCFD as a current framework, while keeping the four pillars, because they are the live structure. Say "IFRS S2" where you mean the requirement and "the TCFD recommendations" only where you mean the historical source. And check whether your jurisdiction has actually legislated, because an effective date on a standard is not a legal obligation on your company.

Our guide to IFRS S1 and S2 against the ESRS sets out how the ISSB standards compare with the European requirements, and our breakdown of the fifteen Scope 3 categories covers the measurement layer underneath both. For a practical half-day treatment, see our carbon accounting CPD course covering the GHG Protocol, TCFD and TNFD.

The disbandment statement and the final status report are both still published by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, on a site that has been frozen since November 2023.