Question

What is sustainability reporting? What is the content of a sustainable report? What does sustainability reporting by the Global Reporting Initiative entail?

Answer 1

Sustainability Reporting:-

Sustainability reporting enables organizations to consider their impacts on a wide range of sustainability issues. This enables them to be more transparent about the risks and opportunities they face.

Sustainability reporting is the key platform for communicating sustainability performance and impacts. A sustainability report in its basic form is a report about an organization’s environmental and social performance.

To make this reporting be as useful as possible for managers, executives, analysts, shareholders and stakeholders. A unified standard that allows reports to be quickly assessed, fairly judged and simply compared is a critical asset. As firms worldwide have embraced sustainability reporting, the most widely adopted framework has been the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Framework. It can be considered as synonymous with other terms for non-financial reporting; triple bottom line reporting and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting.

Building and maintaining trust in businesses and governments is fundamental to achieving a sustainable economy and world. Every day, decisions are made by businesses and governments which have direct impacts on their stakeholders, such as financial institutions, labor organizations, civil society and citizens, and the level of trust they have with them. These decisions are rarely based on financial information alone. They are based on an assessment of risk and opportunity using information on a wide variety of immediate and future issues.

The value of the sustainability reporting process is that it ensures organizations consider their impacts on these sustainability issues, and enables them to be transparent about the risks and opportunities they face.

Stakeholders also play a crucial role in identifying these risks and opportunities for organizations, particularly those that are non-financial. This increased transparency leads to better decision making, which helps build and maintain trust in businesses and governments.

The content of a sustainble report:-

The content of sustainability are the foundations of what this concept represents. Therefore, sustainability is made up of three pillars: economy, society, and the environment. These principles are also informally used as profit, people and planet.

Reporting by the Global Reporting Initiative

The Global Reporting Initiative ( GRI) is an international independent standards organization that helps businesses, governments and other organizations understand and communicate their impacts on issues such as climate change, human rights and corruption.

Under increasing pressure from different stakeholder groups – such as governments, consumers and investors – to be more transparent about their environmental, economic and social impacts, many companies publish a sustainability report, also known as a corporate social responsibility (CSR) or environmental, social and governance (ESG) report. GRI’s framework for sustainability reporting helps companies identify, gather and report this information in a clear and comparable manner. First launched in 2000, GRI’s sustainability reporting framework is now the most widely used by multinational organizations, governments, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), NGOs and industry groups in more than 90 countries. In 2017, 63 percent of the largest 100 companies (N100), and 75 percent of the Global Fortune 250 (G250) reported applying the GRI reporting framework.

The most recent of GRI’s reporting frameworks are the GRI Standards, launched in October 2016. Developed by the Global Sustainability Standards Board (GSSB), the GRI Standards are the first global standards for sustainability reporting and are a free public good. In contrast to the earlier reporting frameworks, the GRI Standards have a modular structure, making them easier to update and adapt.