Global Reporting Initiative - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) produces one of the world's most prevalent standards for sustainability reporting - also known as ecological footprint

Ecological footprint

The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems. It is a standardized measure of demand for natural capital that may be contrasted with the planet's ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area necessary to...

reporting, Environmental Social Governance (ESG

ESG

ESG may refer to:* Engineering Seismology Group, a microseismic monitoring and data analysis company from Canada.* Environmental Social and Corporate Governance, the commonly accepted factors involved in Responsible Investment assessments...

) reporting, Triple Bottom Line

Triple bottom line

The triple bottom line captures an expanded spectrum of values and criteria for measuring organizational success: economic, ecological, and social...

(TBL) reporting, Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility

Corporate social responsibility is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model...

(CSR) reporting. Sustainability reporting is a form of value reporting where an organization publicly communicates their economic, environmental, and social performance

Triple bottom line

The triple bottom line captures an expanded spectrum of values and criteria for measuring organizational success: economic, ecological, and social...

. GRI seeks to make sustainability reporting by all organizations as routine as, and comparable to, financial reporting.

GRI Guidelines are regarded to be widely used. As of January 2009, more than 1,500 organizations from 60 countries use the Guidelines to produce their sustainability reports. (View the world’s reporters at the GRI Reports database). GRI Guidelines apply to corporate businesses, public agencies, smaller enterprises, NGOs, industry groups and others. For municipal governments, they have generally been subsumed by similar guidelines from the UN ICLEI

ICLEI

ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability, founded in 1990 as the 'International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives', is an international association of local governments and national and regional local government organizations that have made a commitment to sustainable development...

Why companies and other organizations publish sustainability reports

Reporting on sustainability performance is an important way for organizations to manage their impact on sustainable development. The challenges of sustainable development are many, and it is widely accepted that organizations have not only a responsibility but also a great ability to exert positive change on the state of the world’s economy, and environmental and social conditions.

Reporting leads to improved sustainable development

Sustainable development

Sustainable development is a pattern of resource use, that aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come...

outcomes because it allows organizations to measure, track, and improve their performance on specific issues. Organizations are much more likely to effectively manage an issue that they can measure. By taking a proactive role to collect, analyze, and report those steps taken by the organization to reduce potential business risk, companies can remain in control of the message they want delivered to its shareholders. Public pressure has proven to be a successful method for promoting Transparency (behavior) and disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions and social responsibilities.

As well as helping organizations manage their impacts, sustainability reporting promotes transparency and accountability. This is because an organization discloses information in the public domain. In doing so, stakeholders (people affected by or interested in an organization’s operations) can track an organization’s performance on broad themes – such as environmental performance - or a particular issue - such as labor conditions in factories. Performance can be monitored year on year, or can be compared to other similar organizations.

Why are the GRI the most used guidelines and how are they created?

"The Global Reporting Initiative is the steward of the most widely used reporting framework for performance on human rights, labor, environmental, anti-corruption, and other corporate citizenship issues. The GRI framework is the most widely used standardized sustainability reporting framework in the world.”
The Guidelines are the most used, credible and trusted framework largely because of the way they have been created: through a multi-stakeholder, consensus-seeking approach.

This means that representatives from a broad cross section of society – business, civil society, labor, accounting, investors, academics, governments, and others – from all around the world come together and achieve consensus on what the Guidelines should contain. Having multiple stakeholders ensures that multiple needs and all stakeholders are considered. This contrasts to what might happen if, for example, just business representatives, or just NGO representatives created the guidelines. It is also beneficial as it helps to increase the chances that all relevant sustainability issues are included, and the accompanying best measures are developed.

About the G3 and the Reporting Framework

The G3 are the so-called “Third Generation” of the GRI’s Sustainability Reporting Guidelines. They were launched in October 2006 at a large international conference that attracted thousands.

There is a “third generation” because the GRI seeks to continually improve the Guidelines. The G3 build on the G2 (released in 2002), which in turn are an evolution of the initial Guidelines, which were released in 2000.
The G3 Guidelines provide universal guidance for reporting on sustainability performance. This means they are applicable to small companies, large multinationals, public sector, NGOs and other types of organizations from all around the world. It is the way that the Guidelines are created (through the multi-stakeholder, consensus seeking approach) that enables them to be so broadly applicable.

The G3 consist of principles and disclosure items (the latter includes performance indicators). The principles help reporters define the report content, the quality of the report, and give guidance on how to set the report boundary. Principles include those such as materiality, stakeholder inclusiveness, comparability and timeliness. Disclosure items include disclosures on management of issues, as well as performance indicators themselves (e.g. “total water withdrawal by source”).

The G3 are the base of the Reporting Framework. There are other elements such as Sector Supplements and National Annexes that respond to the needs of specific sectors, or national reporting requirements.
The Reporting Framework (including the G3) is a free and public good.

Environmental Reporting Guidelines

The GRI aims to harmonise reporting standards for all organizations, of whatever size and geographical origin, on a range of issues with the aim of elevating the status of environmental reporting with that of, for example, financial auditing. Environmental transparency is one of the main areas of business under the scope of the GRI. As outlined in this section the GRI encourages participants to report on their environmental performance using specific criteria. The standardised reporting guidelines concerning the environment are contained within the GRI Indicator Protocol Set. The Performance Indicators (PI) includes criteria on energy, biodiversity and emissions. There are 30 environmental indicators ranging from EN1 (materials used by weight) to EN30 (total environmental expenditures by type of investment).

GRI and Environmental Governance

The GRI is an example of an organisation that acts outside of the top-down power command structures associated with government (e.g. quasi-autonomous bodies and regulators). Environmental governance is a term used to describe the multifaceted and multilayered nature of ‘governing’ the borderless and state-indiscriminate natural environment. Unlike major protected policy areas such as finance or defence, the environment requires sovereign states to sign up to treaties and multilateral agreements in order to coordinate action. Sustainability reporting is a more recent concept that encourages businesses and institutions to report on their environmental performance.
Sustainable reporting is, by definition, a way in which organisations assess their own environmental accomplishments and failings, reflect on this performance and subsequently transfer this information into the public domain. This broad concept has been theoretically termed ‘reflexive environmental law’ by some academics. Reflexive environmental law is an approach in which industry is encouraged to ‘self-reflect’ and ‘self-criticise’ the environmental externalities that result as a product of their activity, and thus act on these negative social impacts in a way that dually safeguards growth and protects the environment. There is also concern that the “exponential demand for disclosure”, as described by Park et al. 2008, undermines the legitimacy and prestige of the GRI. It is, in other words, operating in a saturated market counting on businesses to volunteer their information to competing agencies. More recent organisations include the Carbon Disclosure Project

Carbon Disclosure Project

The Carbon Disclosure Project is an organisation based in the United Kingdom which works with shareholders and corporations to disclose the greenhouse gas emissions of major corporations....

which has similar aims.

The importance of the GRI in a globalising world

The collapse of the USSR and the augmentation of capitalist economic systems in Eastern Europe and more recently in ostentatiously self-styled ‘communist’ countries like China, coined “bamboo capitalism”, suggests that this system of economic governance is likely to shape the world economy in the foreseeable future. Proponents of ‘sustainable capitalism’ or ‘conscious capitalism’ would conclude that organisations like the GRI effectively reconcile capitalism and the environment in an otherwise disjointed world. They concede that capitalism is not currently congruous with environmental aims, but it can be modestly redesigned where an emphasis on the GRI and its counterparts play a bigger, more innate role in business reporting. However, academic criticisms of sustainable reporting in a capitalist context abound. Moneva et al. (2006) suggest that many organisations that subscribe to the GRI’s voluntary reporting regime do not improve their performance and can often manipulate the guidelines just to appear more transparent.

Governance of the GRI

The “GRI” refers to the global network of many thousands worldwide that create the Reporting Framework, use it in disclosing their sustainability performance, demand its use by organizations as the basis for information disclosure, or are actively engaged in improving the standard.

The network is supported by an institutional side of the GRI, which is made up of the following governance bodies: Board of Directors, Stakeholder Council, Technical Advisory Committee, Organizational Stakeholders, and a Secretariat. Diverse geographic and sector constituencies are represented in these governance bodies. The GRI headquarters and Secretariat is in Amsterdam

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...

, The Netherlands.

History

The GRI was formed by the United States based non-profits Ceres

Ceres (organization)

Ceres is a non-profit, American network of investors, environmental organizations and other public interest groups working with companies and investors to address sustainability challenges, such as global climate change....

http://www.ceres.org (formerly the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies) and Tellus Institute, with the support of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1997. It released an “exposure draft” version of the Sustainability Reporting Guidelines in 1999, the first full version in 2000, the second version was released at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg

Johannesburg

Johannesburg also known as Jozi, Jo'burg or Egoli, is the largest city in South Africa, by population. Johannesburg is the provincial capital of Gauteng, the wealthiest province in South Africa, having the largest economy of any metropolitan region in Sub-Saharan Africa...

– where the organization and the Guidelines were also referred to in the Plan of Implementation signed by all attending member states. Later that year it became a permanent institution, with its Secretariat in Amsterdam

Amsterdam

, the Netherlands. Although the GRI is independent, it remains a collaborating centre of UNEP and works in cooperation with the United Nations Global Compact.

Retired South African judge Mervyn E. King

Mervyn King (judge)

Mervyn Eldred King is a South African corporate attorney, arbitrator, mediator, corporate director, commission chair, author and speaker. A former judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa, he is currently the director of the Global Reporting Initiative and the Association of Business...

has served as Director of the GRI since 2006.

External links

A brief history details concerning global action network with GRI
The Global Reporting Initiative Homepage
Download the GRI Reporting Framework
Download the GRI-certified, free reporting tool 'GRI-Worksheet'
Ceres: GRI & Sustainability Reporting
The Global Reporting Initiative - some critical analysis from the mallenbaker.net site on corporate social responsibility.

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