GRI Standards

While the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) refers to the organization behind the framework, the GRI Standards are the concrete, publicly available set of rules according to which companies and other organizations report on their impacts on the economy, the environment, and people. The fundamentally revised version was published in 2021 and has been mandatory since January 2023 for organizations reporting with reference to GRI.

The GRI Standards are organized into three series. The Universal Standards apply to every reporting organization and comprise GRI 1 (Foundation), GRI 2 (General Disclosures, e.g. on governance structure and organizational profile), and GRI 3 (Material Topics, which describes the process for determining material topics). The Sector Standards provide industry-specific guidance on which topics are typically relevant for a given sector, such as oil and gas or agriculture. The Topic Standards, finally, contain the concrete disclosure requirements for individual topics such as emissions, water use, working conditions, or anti-corruption.

In practice, an organization first carries out a materiality analysis under GRI 3 to determine its material topics, and then reports using the relevant Topic Standards. Organizations can either report fully "in accordance with" the GRI Standards or refer to individual standards as a reference only.

The GRI Standards are voluntarily applied by a large number of organizations worldwide and also serve as a methodological basis for other frameworks and rating systems, such as rating approaches like EcoVadis. Interfaces with mandatory frameworks such as the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) are increasingly being built to reduce duplicate reporting effort.