Developing sustainability reporting - Case Cargotec - Aaltodoc

Similarly, Isaksson & Steimle (2009) suggest that because the GRI guidelines require neither the
company’s sustainability level nor its sustainability progress to be compared to industry
benchmarks, they do not assure that the report tells how sustainable the company is and whether
its sustainability performance is improving. Without benchmark information provided, it is
difficult to judge how the company compares with others. That is why the authors conclude that
the GRI guidelines are not sufficient to make sustainability reporting relevant and clear.
Importantly, Sherman (2009) notes that non-comparability is not necessarily to blame on the GRI
guidelines themselves, but rather it may follow from inconsistent application of the guidelines,
which is a result of the voluntary nature of their use. Similarly, Vurro & Perrini (2011) state that
as long as reporting remains voluntary, neither a common format nor a universal reporting
language, style, and practice exists to create more comparable reports. Besides, the voluntary
nature of the GRI framework allows companies to leave out important indicators that suggest
poor sustainability performance (Kaenzig et al. 2011). According to Moneva et al. (2006),
evidence from practice shows that the guidelines are used in a biased way as some GRI reporters
do not actually behave responsibly with respect to e.g. social equity.
PwC (2011) argues that the GRI guidelines do not consider company-specific corporate
responsibility characteristics sufficiently. According to them, the risk of GRI reporting is that
companies might not recognise the sustainability impacts that are most material to the particular
business if those issues are not included in the GRI indicators.
Besides, Moneva et al. (2006) argue that too little focus has been put on understanding
stakeholder expectations. For instance customers’ needs might not be considered sufficiently
within the GRI guidelines (Isaksson & Steimle 2009). Indeed, the GRI’s key challenge is to
consider the variety of disclosure expectations of different report users (Willis 2003).
As a result of trying to be as comprehensive as possible, the number of GRI indicators is steadily
growing, which could make effective use of the reports difficult (Greeves & Lapido 2004). For
example Cormier et al. (2011) criticise the fact that the GRI’s scope is continuously being
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