Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
The world’s most widely used sustainability reporting framework. GRI helps companies disclose their impacts on the economy, environment, and people, and is referenced by regulators and stakeholders in over 100 countries.
What it is
GRI is a global framework for sustainability reporting issued by the Global Reporting Initiative, an independent multi-stakeholder non-profit. It’s been around in some form since 2000, and the current system was significantly revised in 2021 — those revisions (“GRI 2021”) came into effect for reports published on or after 1 January 2023.
The framework is modular, organized into three building blocks. Universal Standards apply to every organization: GRI 1 (Foundation) explains how to use the standards, GRI 2 (General Disclosures) covers the company’s profile, governance, strategy, and stakeholder engagement, and GRI 3 (Material Topics) guides how to identify which topics matter most to your business and stakeholders. Sector Standards add industry-specific requirements for high-impact sectors — Oil and Gas, Coal, Agriculture, and Mining have been published, with more in development. Topic Standards cover specific ESG topics like energy, water, emissions, employment, and diversity.
In practice, a GRI-aligned report involves working through the Universal Standards, identifying your material topics through GRI 3’s process, and then reporting against the relevant Topic Standards (and Sector Standards, if your industry has one published). A typical mid-sized company will end up with somewhere around 80–150 individual disclosure datapoints, depending on which topics are material and which sector standards apply.
GRI puts a strong emphasis on impact materiality — the company’s most significant impacts on the economy, environment, and people, regardless of whether those impacts affect the company’s own financial performance. That’s the conceptual difference between GRI and investor-focused frameworks like IFRS S1/S2.
Who needs it
GRI itself is a voluntary framework — no jurisdiction makes “using GRI” a universal legal requirement. But it’s the most widely referenced sustainability framework in the world, and it sits behind a lot of disclosure regimes that are mandatory.
The most consequential link is to the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and its underlying European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). ESRS was co-developed with GRI, and an interoperability index maps ESRS datapoints directly to GRI Standards. Companies in scope of CSRD — around 42,500 EU and EU-connected companies as the regime phases in — are effectively reporting in a GRI-aligned way for many topics.
In India, listed companies subject to SEBI’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR) regime have an official mapping document linking BRSR indicators to GRI Standards. In countries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific — Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, and others — GRI is referenced in corporate governance codes, stock exchange guidelines, or sustainability finance taxonomies.
For a mid-sized supplier, the most common reason to adopt GRI is pressure from larger customers and lenders. Companies in scope of CSRD, BRSR, or other regimes need GRI-style data from their value chains to complete their own reports. If you supply or borrow from one of those companies, GRI is often the easiest way to answer their data requests.
How to start
If you’ve never reported against GRI before, start with the Universal Standards. GRI 1 explains the concepts, GRI 2 walks through general disclosures about your company, and GRI 3 takes you through the materiality process.
If you’ve reported with reference to selected GRI Standards before, the next step is usually moving toward “in accordance” reporting, which requires meeting all Universal Standards requirements and reporting Topic Standards for all material topics.
Common questions
Questions teams ask about GRI.
Also working with the other frameworks?
We’re early and building deliberately.
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