The standards your stakeholders ask about.

Sustainability reporting is the practice of disclosing how your company affects — and is affected by — environmental, social, and governance issues. That covers things like greenhouse gas emissions, energy and water use, workforce data, supply chain practices, and how the business is governed. The output is usually an annual report, structured against one or more standardized frameworks, that’s read by investors, banks, regulators, large customers, and other stakeholders. As climate and social risks become material to how companies operate, the people who fund and buy from those companies want consistent, comparable information about how they’re managing those risks. Sustainability reporting is the language that information is written in.

A few reasons, depending on where you sit. If you’re a listed company in the EU, UK, Australia, or any of a growing list of jurisdictions, sustainability reporting is becoming a legal requirement on a phased timeline. If you’re a private company supplying larger ones, your customers are increasingly asking you for sustainability data so they can complete their mandatory reports. Beyond formal reports, customers across MEA and globally are increasingly factoring sustainability performance into supplier selection — environmental, social, and ethical practices are now part of how procurement teams evaluate vendors. If you borrow from banks, more and more lending decisions factor in ESG performance. And if you’re trying to win contracts with governments, large enterprises, or development finance institutions, sustainability disclosure is often part of procurement. Even outside formal mandates, sustainability reporting is becoming a default expectation of doing business. The earlier you start, the easier it gets — first reports are always the slowest, and the data infrastructure pays off across every subsequent year.

They do different jobs. GHG Protocol is the measurement engine. It tells you how to calculate your greenhouse gas emissions — what to count, how to count it, and how to organize it into Scope 1 (direct emissions you own), Scope 2 (electricity you buy), and Scope 3 (everything else in your value chain). GRI is the broadest reporting framework. It tells you what to disclose to a wide audience — investors, employees, communities, regulators, customers — about your company’s impacts on the economy, environment, and people. It’s the most widely used sustainability reporting framework in the world. IFRS S1 and S2 are investor-focused disclosure standards from the ISSB. They tell you what to disclose to investors and lenders specifically, focused on the sustainability and climate risks that affect your company’s financial prospects. S2 is climate-specific; S1 covers everything else. In practice, most companies use GHG Protocol to measure emissions, then report those emissions through GRI (for stakeholder communication) and/or IFRS S1/S2 (for investor communication). They’re complementary, not competing.

Probably not all three at the same intensity. The mix depends on three things: where you operate, who your stakeholders are, and what they’re asking you for. If your investors and regulators are the priority, IFRS S1/S2 is becoming the global baseline for that. If your customers, employees, and broader stakeholders are the priority, GRI is the most widely recognized framework. If you’re tracking emissions for any reason — climate targets, customer requests, regulatory disclosure — GHG Protocol is the underlying measurement standard for almost every other framework. Most mid-sized companies start with GHG Protocol for emissions plus one of GRI or IFRS for the broader report, and add the other later as their reporting matures.

If you’re new to all of this, start with two questions: who is asking for this data, and what are they asking for? If a specific customer, bank, or regulator is asking for a specific framework, start there. If you’re getting general ESG questionnaires from multiple stakeholders, GHG Protocol-based emissions reporting plus a GRI-aligned summary covers most of what they want. If you’re a listed company anticipating mandatory disclosure, IFRS S1/S2 is the framework to build toward. Whichever path you pick, the underlying work is similar: get your operational data into one place, calculate your emissions, identify your material topics, and write the report. The framework determines the structure, not the underlying data work.

Our reporting guides go deeper on each of these topics — from choosing your first framework to calculating Scope 3 emissions. Browse the reporting guides