The Global Reporting Initiative

2002 GRI Guidelines released.

OEF Summary Series No. 2: The Global Reporting Initiative

Background

The GRI is an initiative launched late 1997 by the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The goal of the GRI is to raise the practice of corporate sustainability reporting to the level of rigour, credibility, comparability and verifiability of financial

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reporting. To achieve general acceptance of sustainability reporting, the GRI strives to ensure both transparency and legitimacy – where the rules of disclosure are designed, developed and disseminated through an inclusive and balanced process involving NGOs, business and other stakeholders from around the world.

The first set of GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines appeared as an Exposure Draft in 1999. Following testing and public comment, the GRI released the June 2000 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines. For the past year, over 200 stakeholders from around the world have worked with the GRI to update the performance indicators of the June 2000 GRI Guidelines. The second version of the Guidelines was released in September 2002.

The release of the 2000 Guidelines marks the beginning of a new cycle of revisions. The GRI Board of Directors is developing a clear and detailed due process for the further refinement of the 2002 Guidelines with the aim of releasing an updated version in 2004.

More than 100 companies have released reports based on the GRI Guidelines. The following countries have the highest number of reporting companies: USA, UK, Japan, Sweden, Netherlands. A complete list of the companies using the GRI Guidelines is updated regularly on www.globalreporting.org

Introduction (from the GRI 2002 Guidelines)

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is a long-term, multi-stakeholder, international process whose mission is to develop and disseminate globally applicable Sustainability Reporting Guidelines (“Guidelines”). These Guidelines are for voluntary use by organisations for reporting on the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of their activities, products, and services. The aim of the Guidelines is to assist reporting organisations and their stakeholders in articulating and understanding the overall contributions of the reporting organisations toward sustainable development.

Since the publication of the first Sustainability Reporting Guidelines in June 2000, the trends that catalysed the formation of GRI have continued unabated and, in most cases, have intensified. The issues—globalisation and corporate governance, accountability, and citizenship—have now moved to the mainstream of policy and management debates in many organisations. The turbulent first years of the 21st century underscore the reason for GRI’s rapid expansion: higher standards of accountability and increasing dependence on wideranging external networks will form a significant part of the fabric of organisational practice in the years to come.

Support for creating a new, generally accepted disclosure framework for sustainability
reporting continues to grow among civil society, business, government, and labour. GRI’s rapid evolution in just a few years from a bold vision to a new permanent global institution reflects the imperative and the value that various constituencies assign to such a disclosure framework. The GRI process, rooted in inclusiveness, transparency, neutrality, and continual enhancement, has enabled GRI to give concrete expression to accountability.

Linkages

The Global Compact (GC) has invited its corporate supporters to use the GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines to demonstrate progress toward implementation of the GC's nine principles. For the Global Compact, GRI reporting is a concrete, accountability instrument through which companies can measure and publicly report on their social, environmental and economic performance. For the GRI, the GC's principles represent a valuable foundation on which companies can build a strong reporting program.



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