According to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI):
"Sustainability reporting is a process which starts with an organization determining its material topics based on its most significant impacts on the economy, on the environment, and on people, including its impacts on people's human rights".
GRI is an independent, international organisation that develops reporting standards to support companies and organisations in externally communicating their sustainability efforts. The GRI Standards are the world’s most widely used for sustainability reporting.
As described on the GRI's website, the GRI Standards are suitable for any organisation, regardless of its size, type, country of operation, and reporting experience.
The sooner you start identifying what you have to disclose, the easier it will be to draft your sustainability report. Indeed, you need to gather data to disclose specific indicators. Moreover, your company will have to conduct a materiality assessment and engage with stakeholders. These two steps are usually ongoing and time-consuming.
Disclosing your sustainability efforts in line with the GRI Standards has various internal and external benefits for your organisation. According to GRI, the value of reporting can be summarised as follows:
More concretely, reporting in accordance with the GRI Standards allows your organisation to:
In 2021, GRI published new reporting standards. They will become mandatory for reports published after the 1st of January 2023. Nevertheless, we highly recommend already analysing them and even implementing them in your sustainability report.
This section provides an overview of the three main standards of GRI: Universal, Sector and Topic Standards (Figure 1).
GRI 1: Foundation explains the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of reporting against the GRI Standards. It highlights its purpose and the key principles to follow when reporting.
Additionally, it clarifies critical concepts, such as:
Originally, organisations could choose to prepare a GRI Sustainability Report in accordance with the Standards under the Core or Comprehensive option.
With the new GRI Standards 2021, the only two options available are "in accordance" and "in reference".
This option is the more strict one. In fact, it requires to comply with all the 9 requirements highlighted in the Standards. Specifically, the requirements are:
This is the more accessible option. Therefore, it could be the first step to take when deciding to use this framework. In this case, organisations are asked to:
The GRI Standards include a set of reporting principles to keep in mind when drafting the sustainability report. They aim to ensure a high-quality representation of the organisation's sustainability performance.
GRI 2 – General Disclosures aims to represent the profile of the reporting entity by looking at the:
GRI 3 – Material Topics provides guidance on how an organisation can determine its material topics, how to disclose them and the way they are managed.
A materiality analysis is a process through which an organisation can identify the most significant environmental and social impacts generated.
This section describes a step-by-step approach to conducting a materiality analysis (see Figure 2):
According to GRI 3 - Material Topics, disclosure should include:
The reporting organisation has to disclose the process used to identify material topics, as well as to prioritise them.
The organisation has to disclose the list of all the material topics identified through the materiality analysis. The results can be also presented in a sustainability materiality matrix, to be referenced in the content index.
The organisation must describe the actual and potential, negative and positive impacts generated. For each of the material topics, the reporting entity must disclose actions implemented to manage the topic and its related impacts.
GRI is developing Sector Specific Standards for 40 industries, starting with those that generate the biggest impacts. They support reporting organisations in writing a sustainability report by defining material topics for the industry and key information to disclose.
Currently, the Sector Disclosures are available for the following sectors:
If your organisation falls into one of the above industries, you should use the Sector Standards to draft your sustainability report. You can access them from the GRI’s Resource Center.
If a specific standard is not yet available for your industry, you should select the Topics Standards relevant to your organisation.
The GRI Topic Standards are used based on the material topics identified during the materiality analysis.
Each Standard contains an overview of what the reporting entity should disclose on that topic. Therefore, organisations should select those Topic Standards that correspond to their material topics and use them for reporting.
Below are some examples of Topics Standards:
Topic Standards are available in the GRI’s Resource Center as well.
Yes, you can report with reference to the GRI Standards (as opposed to in accordance with the Standards). While you still have to follow the eight reporting principles, you do not need to adhere to all nine reporting requirements. Instead, you only need to (1) Publish a GRI content index (2) Provide a statement of use (3) Notify GRI.
You do not need to have your GRI report certified to publish it with a GRI logo. You do have to follow the nine reporting requirements and the eight reporting principles. Once you prepare a sustainability report in accordance with the GRI standards, you have to notify the GRI.
With regard to materiality analysis, the two standards require that such an analysis is done. There are guidelines and suggestions on how to conduct it, but the actual steps are not a requirement. The requirement is to have done it and to describe the process.
All resources can be found on the GRI website accessible via this link.
The 2021 Standards are in effect for reporting from 1 January 2023. As GRI encourages early adoption, you can already comply with them in your 2022 report.
If the organisation cannot comply with a specific disclosure or requirement, a reason for the omission is needed. In particular, the organisation should highlight missing information in the content index and provide one of the four reasons for omission:
To notify GRI you can use the GRI Standards Report Registration System. Your submission may take some time to be processed but this will not affect your compliance with the notification requirement.