Review of the Global Reporting Initiative

Project context

During the past decade, reporting on non-financial indicators (‘sustainability reporting’) has seen tremendous growth, greatly supported by programs such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Today, more than 600 organizations in all sectors explicitly recognize using the GRI Guidelines for reporting on their economic, environmental, and social performance. However, so far, the market for sustainability reporting is far from fully leveraged. While many companies, especially large firms, have adopted sustainability indicators in their regular reporting practice, corporate environmental and social reporting is still very much a minority practice. Also, many industry sectors have not yet developed industry consensus on performance indicators for reporting against their specific sector’s progress and gaps. Finally, there still exist a plethora of different reporting systems, undermining the overall comparability and transparency of non-financial reporting.

Much needs to be accomplished, therefore, and initiatives such as the GRI will need to provide much leadership to make non-financial reporting a mainstream issue in the coming years.

Project objectives

To enable the GRI to assume such a leadership role, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) tasked the Global Public Policy Institute to conduct a review of the GRI, and to advance practical recommendations that could help shape the future development of that initiative in productive ways.

The review included three components:

• An analysis of the GRI reporting framework, i.e. its products and services (including technical protocols, sector supplements, etc.)
• An evaluation of the GRI institutional structure and business model
• A general review of overall developments in the market for financial reporting

Based on this analysis, UNEP asked GPPi to include a set of practical recommendations in its final review report, including:

• Recommendations on the future development of GRI products.
• Recommendations for the development of a sustainable GRI business model.
• Recommendations for building relations between GRI and other public and private initiatives in the area of non-financial reporting.

             

Links

Trends and Figures in Non-Financial Reporting

 

KPMG International Survey of Corporate Responsibility Reporting 2005

KPMG International Survey of Corporate Responsibility Reporting 2002

ACCA: Toward transparency: progress on global sustainability reporting 2004

UBS investment research: Why try to quantify the unquantifiable?

Pleon Kothes Klewes: Accounting for good: The global stakeholder report 2005

SustainAbility / United nations environmental programme / Standard & Poor's Risk  & Opportunity best practice in non-financial reporting

 

Related links

 

The Global Reporting Initiative

CERES

Corporate Register

 

SRI

 

FTSE 4Good Index

Dow Jones Sustainability Index

SAM

 

Internationals standards, guidelines and codes

 

United Nations Global Compact

ILO conventions

OECD guidelines for multinational Enterprises

Millennium Development Goals

ISO 26000 standard (voluntary guidance on social responsibility)

SA 8000

AA 1000