February 2005, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
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 (the “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 contributions of the reporting organisations to sustainable development.
The GRI Guidelines are a framework for reporting on an organisation’s economic, environmental, and social performance. The Guidelines:
- present reporting principles and specific content to guide the preparation of organisation-level sustainability reports;
- assist organisations in presenting a balanced and reasonable picture of their economic, environmental, and social performance;
- promote comparability of sustainability reports, while taking into account the practical considerations related to disclosing information across a diverse range of organisations, many with extensive and geographically dispersed operations;
- support benchmarking and assessment of sustainability performance with respect to codes, performance standards, and voluntary initiatives; and
- serve as an instrument to facilitate stakeholder engagement.
The Guidelines are not:
- a code or set of principles of conduct;
- a performance standard (e.g., emissions target for a specific pollutant); or
- a management system.
The Guidelines do not:
- provide instruction for designing an organisation’s internal data management and reporting systems; or
- offer methodologies for preparing reports, or for performing monitoring and verification of such reports.
