What is sustainability reporting?

Sustainability reporting is a process for publicly disclosing an organization’s economic, environmental, and social performance. Many organizations find that financial reporting alone no longer satisfies the needs of shareholders, customers, communities, and other stakeholders for information about overall organizational performance.

The term “sustainability reporting” is synonymous with citizenship reporting, social reporting, triple-bottom line reporting and other terms that encompass the economic, environmental, and social aspects of an organization’s performance.

What are the benefits of reporting?

For reporting organizations, the GRI Reporting Framework provides tools for: management, increased comparability and reduced costs of sustainability, brand and reputation enhancement, differentiation in the marketplace, protection from brand erosion resulting from the actions of suppliers or competitors, networking and communications.

For report users, the GRI Reporting Framework are a useful benchmarking tool, corporate governance tool and an avenue for long term dialogue with reporting organizations.

Why do we need the GRI Reporting Framework?

Companies follow a generally accepted reporting framework for financial reporting. Without a similarly accepted framework for sustainability reports, such reports could lack the features that could make them broadly useful: credibility, consistency, and comparability. If the thousands of companies that voluntarily disclose their sustainability impacts did not refer to a generally accepted reporting framework, they would risk producing non-comparable reports, and/or reports which inadequately address the full spectrum of stakeholder interests. A generally accepted sustainability reporting framework also simplifies report preparation and assessment, helping both reporters and report users gain greater value from sustainability reporting.

Because the development costs of the GRI framework is shared among multiple users, the overall transaction cost for reporters is considerably lower than costs might be should a company develop it’s ‘own company’ or ‘own sector’ reporting framework.

What makes the GRI the right choice for sustainability reporting?

A Multi-Stakeholder Process.

GRI firmly believes that multi-stakeholder engagement is the most valuable way to produce reporting guidance that is universally applicable and appropriately responds to stakeholders’ needs. Accordingly, all elements of the GRI reporting framework are created and continuously improved using a consensus-seeking process involving practitioners worldwide with diverse backgrounds. Business, civil society, labor, accounting, investors, academics, governments, and practitioners are all included in multi-stakeholder negotiations.

A Record of Accomplishment.

GRI is fast becoming the global de-facto standard in sustainability reporting. Since its inception in 1997, nearly 1000 organizations have referenced the Guidelines in their sustainability reports. These include organizations from many sectors, and from every corner of the globe. Several governments and high-profile multi-nationals, as well as the EU, OECD, UN, World Economic Forum, have referenced the GRI Guidelines in communications to their constituents. There are literally thousands of stakeholders – up to 20,000 – who participate within GRI’s broad communication network. Stakeholders are increasingly demanding greater capacity building activities from GRI to support their use of the framework.

Independence.

GRI maintains its independence through its governance structure and funding approach. GRI’s multi-stakeholder governance structure reflects the diversity of geographic and stakeholder constituency that have always been the foundation of GRI’s legitimacy. These governance bodies are the Board of Directors, Stakeholder Council, Technical Advisory Committee, Organizational Stakeholders and Secretariat. To ensure no single stakeholder group dominates, funding is secured through many sources, such as governments, companies, foundations, and multi-lateral organizations. GRI’s business model aims to achieve some degree of self-sufficiency.

Who has published reports based on the GRI Guidelines?

To date, thousands of organizations in the auto, utility, consumer products, pharmaceuticals, financial, telecommunications, transport, energy and chemicals sectors, among others, in addition to public authorities and non-profits, have published reports that adopt part or all of the Guidelines. The reports database has a regularly updated list of these organizations.

Is the GRI Reporting Framework relevant to my organization or sector?

Organizations of all sizes and types operating in any location should use the GRI Reporting Framework. The Guidelines form the core of the Framework, and are not specific to any single industry sector. The question is not whether an organization can cover all aspects of the Guidelines in its first report. The real question is whether an organization is serious about systematic disclosure of its non-financial information in a form that meets stakeholder expectations for rigor, consistency, and timeliness. This seriousness can be demonstrated in only one way: launching a reporting process.

Where they exist, Sector Supplements can be used to respond to the specific reporting needs of sectors. Sector Supplements should be used in addition to, not instead of, the Guidelines. This helps provide a general framework but also enables sector-specific information to be disclosed.