Climate Action 2011-2012

setting a minimum requirement (explain) but leaving the top
open for innovation and improvement (report). As explained
above, some governments and stock exchanges have already
adopted this approach, but there is more to be done to make
reporting standard practice.
Collaboration is key to getting more useful, reliable
information to the market – to getting more reports and
better reporting. Better reporting means information that
is clear, relevant, meaningful and comparable. To achieve
comparability, GRI works closely with other organisations,
and aims to harmonise with different frameworks and
principles – including the UN Global Compact, the OECD
and its Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, and ISO
26000. Like the CDP, GRI bases its emissions guidance on
the most widely used international calculation standard:
the GHG Protocol Corporate Reporting and Accounting
Standard developed by the World Resources Institute
(WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable
Development (WBCSD). Furthermore, GRI offers guidance
on how different reporting frameworks are linked, including
a document on the alignment between GRI’s Framework
and the CDP Questionnaire. Such tools help ensure that the
questionnaires and requests for isolated data can be integrated
and contextualised with wider sustainability disclosure.
Better reporting means
information that is clear, relevant,
meaningful and comparable.
Comparability is also an objective of the International
Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC). The IIRC is
currently developing guidance for organisations that want
to report their sustainability impacts in the context of
their financial performance, integrated together. The IIRC
Framework will be mutually complementary with the GRI
Framework, and with global financial reporting standards.
RepoRting guidelineS
GRI is now working on the next generation of Sustainability
Reporting Guidelines – G4 – which aims to advance
harmonisation with other frameworks and principles,
including the IIRC. G4 will also help make reports more
relevant and comparable, by including improved technical
definitions. Many stakeholders use GRI’s Guidelines to
assess companies’ performance. But even those companies
that follow the Guidelines can interpret the guidance
in different ways, resulting in a difficult comparison
between masses and volumes, decimal and imperial and
normalised data. G4 will provide reporting guidance that
is fit for mainstream use, and that prepares companies for
comparison and benchmarking.
The practice of sustainability reporting can improve
all reporting organisations. A constant theme of GRI’s
reporting guidance is the necessity for ongoing stakeholder
engagement and ongoing feeding back of report data to
directors and executives. The revealing of information is
not the sole goal of reporting. Rather, it is the way such
information is fed back to senior decision-makers in order
to influence policy, strategy and operations that better
represents one of reporting’s major uses.
G4 will provide reporting guidance
that is fit for mainstream use,
and that prepares companies for
comparison and benchmarking.
What companies should really be thinking about is
how they can improve sustainability performance. In a
rapidly changing world, with a growing population and
depleting natural resources, how can companies mitigate
risk, take opportunities and innovate? How can finance and
sustainability be linked in strategy, to ensure that companies
are positioned to be part of the solution to an unsustainable
economic model? How can companies reduce their impacts
and help support the world in its necessary move to a
sustainable global economy? Sustainability reporting can
indicate valuable options for those companies that choose
to start their reporting journey.
Ernst Ligteringen has been Chief Executive of GRI since 2002, when it
was established as an independent organisation with an international
secretariat in Amsterdam. Ligteringen is a member of GRI’s multistakeholder
Board of Directors. Before joining GRI, he worked for
more than 20 years at various non-governmental and international
organisations. His positions included postings in Africa, the Caribbean,
Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Europe, as Executive Director
of Oxfam International, Director of Programme Co-ordination of the
International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies,
and Consultant to the World Commission on the Social Dimension of
Globalisation at the ILO.
The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) drives sustainability reporting by
all organisations. GRI produces a comprehensive Sustainability Reporting
Framework that is widely used around the world, to enable greater
organisational transparency. The Framework, including the Reporting
Guidelines, sets out the principles and indicators organisations can use
to report their economic, environmental, and social performance. GRI
is committed to continuously improving and increasing the use of the
Guidelines, which are freely available to the public.
Global Reporting Initiative
Metropool Building, 5th Floor, Weesperstraat 95, PO Box 10039
1001 EA, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Tel: +31 (0)20 531 0000 | Fax: +31 (0)20 531 0031
Email: reportservices@globalreporting.org
Web: www.globalreporting.org
131 climateactionprogramme.org