Qatar ESG reporting rules: who must report, and when

On 26 June 2025 the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority issued its GENE (Corporate Sustainability Reporting) and Minor and Technical Amendments Rules 2025. The rules apply the ISSB standards, specifically IFRS S1 on general sustainability-related disclosures and IFRS S2 on climate-related disclosures.

Reporting is mandatory for Category A firms, which the Authority describes as the larger firms such as banks and insurers. The perimeter does not stop there: the Authority operates a designation process that allows it to apply the reporting framework to a firm once that firm has received a written notice. If you are authorised in the QFC and are not a Category A firm, the question is not whether the rules apply today but whether you could be designated.

The rules containing the corporate sustainability reporting requirements commence on 1 January 2026.

The Qatar Central Bank’s Sustainability Reporting Framework enters into force for annual financial reporting periods beginning on 1 January 2026. A financial institution must prepare and submit a sustainability report to the QCB for each annual financial year from that date, and the report must carry an explicit and unreserved statement of compliance with IFRS S1 and IFRS S2.

The framework is phased rather than immediate. It carries proportionality mechanisms that let an institution answer qualitatively where it lacks the skills, capabilities or resources to answer quantitatively, and it carries five numbered transition reliefs. Reliefs 1 to 3 cover the first annual reporting period. Reliefs 4 and 5 run for two years, and they are the two that matter most in practice.

Relief 5 permits a financial institution not to disclose its Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions during its first and second reporting years. Relief 4 lets an institution that already measured emissions by a method other than the GHG Protocol keep using that method for the comparative figures, provided the report states that different methods were used and explains how that affects the comparison. Neither is a permanent exemption.

One point is easy to miss. A branch or subsidiary of a foreign financial institution operating in Qatar, whose head office does not apply the ISSB standards at group level, is required to prepare and submit a sustainability report at branch level.

For companies listed on the Qatar Stock Exchange the instrument is the Qatar Financial Markets Authority’s Governance Code for Listed Companies, and the practical document to read is the Authority’s Guidance on Corporate Sustainability Reporting for Companies Listed on the Main Market, published on 23 November 2025. Companies listed on the Venture Market are covered by a separate corporate governance code.

The Authority publishes that guidance alongside two other documents that tell you where Qatar sits internationally: the IFRS Sustainability Standards jurisdictional profile for Qatar, and ISSA 5000, the international standard on sustainability assurance. Read together they describe a listed-company regime built on IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 and assured to an international standard.

Reporting dates, phasing and any extension for listed companies are not restated on this page. Deadlines of this kind get amended, a summary of one goes stale silently, and the only safe version is the one on the Authority’s own site, linked below.

The Qatar Stock Exchange publishes its own Guidance on ESG Reporting for listed companies. The exchange is explicit that the guidelines are currently voluntary, and equally explicit that it expects reporting material ESG metrics, and in time full sustainability reports, to become mandatory.

The exchange does not endorse one standard for every issuer. It names the Global Reporting Initiative and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board as the most widely used international sustainability reporting standards, and it runs a platform on which a listed company records its progress and an investor can read it.

For a listed company the practical consequence is that the binding obligation comes from the QFMA, while the exchange sets the reporting habit. A company that has been reporting to the QSE guidance voluntarily is not starting from zero when the Authority’s requirements bite.

A sustainability disclosure that nobody checks is a marketing document. The international answer is ISSA 5000, the International Standard on Sustainability Assurance issued by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board, which sets the framework for independent assurance of sustainability disclosures. The QFMA lists it among the guidance resources it publishes for listed companies, and the QCB framework carries its own section on external assurance.

The planning consequence is worth stating plainly: the people who will need assured numbers are the same people now choosing a measurement method under a transition relief. A method chosen because it was convenient in the first reporting year is a method an assurance provider will look at in the third.