The IIRC Framework Is Open for Consultation -- What Impact Will It Have?

If you are a company that already publishes a sustainability report (or is thinking about doing it in the future), stop what you're doing and pay attention. 

For the last 15 years, most sustainability reporting has been driven by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI ), which publishes a stakeholder-driven set of sustainability reporting guidelines designed to give companies a framework for disclosing their economic, social, and environmental impacts.

While GRI is an essential part of the sustainability reporting field, a new player has appeared who may shake things up: the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC). The IRRC is a group designed to promote "integrate reporting" -- which is integrating sustainability and financial reporting into a single, more meaningful model.

Why is this important now?

The IIRC has launched the consulting draft of integrated reporting framework. Over the next ninety days, the organization is seeking feedback on the draft from companies, investor groups, reporting standards organizations, accounting bodies and regulators — basically everyone who has a stake in the transformation of corporate reporting.

The framework differs from standard financial reporting in a number of ways:

(For more information on the topic, check out the IIRC executive director's article in the Harvard Business Review).

Even if you aren't a publicly-traded organization and don’t have equity investors, this is still important. The IIRC framework has the potential to change the types of questions that stakeholder will ask -- including customers, suppliers, financiers, and local advocates. 

So check out the draft framework and make your voice heard. (At least take a look -- you'll want to know what's coming down the pipeline regardless of your level of commitment at this time!)

Congrats Blekinge Institute of Technology Graduates: Strategically Driving GRI Reporting Towards Sustainability

Congratulations to Edwin Janssen, Selene Kfoury, and Rutger Verkouw for their recent completion of “Mind the Gap! Strategically Driving DRI Reporting Towards Sustainability!” These graduates of the Blekinge Institute of Technology focused on discovering how the GRI reporting process and other modes of sustainability preparation could be united with an “Integrated Process” in their thesis. And here at SSC we are proud to say that we aided them along the way through the “Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability” program!

The following is a short description provided by the institute on their findings:

“Sustainability reporting is a vital tool to communicate an organization’s sustainability performance to stakeholders. Sustainability reporting also allows an organization to communicate its vision, goals and strategic plans. In order to be strategic towards sustainability, an organization should have a vision of where it wants to go, and assess where it is today, so as to take the right initiatives towards its vision. This thesis focuses on how GRI sustainability reporting and strategic planning towards sustainability can be combined in an integrated process to help organizations move towards sustainability. The Integrated Process allows an organization to gain a better understanding of its sustainability context; design resilient strategies in light of that context using a back casting from Sustainability Principles approach; and report its sustainability performance and progress in bridging the gap towards sustainability, transparently to internal and external stakeholders.”

To read the entire report, click here!

Strategic Sustainability Consulting Supports Public Comment on G4 "Sustainability Context"

At Strategic Sustainability Consulting, we are so proud to have joined voices with other corporate sustainability practitioners, academics, analysts, and advisors in calling upon the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) to improve and enhance its treatment of "sustainability context" in the forthcoming G4 version of its sustainability reporting guidelines. In a public comment submitted September 24, 2012 to GRI by the Sustainability Context Group (of which we are a member), we stated:

Although GRI's Guidelines currently do advocate for the inclusion of Sustainability Context in organizational reports, they fail to provide specific guidance for how to do so. Because of this lack of guidance, very few GRI-based sustainability reports have ever actually included such context--and yet without it, there can be no true or authentic sustainability reporting, in our opinion. For the sake of the credibility--and usefulness--of sustainability report, it is vitally important that this shortcoming be resolved, and that GRI take steps to include specific guidance in G4 for how to implement Sustainability Context in contemporary reporting.

We are deeply grateful for the leadership of Mark McElroy and Bill Baue, who championed the Sustainability Context Group through several intense versions of this letter. In the end, they crafted a solid and practical approach:

Rather than devise a specific procedure for how to implement Sustainability Context in organizational reporting, we believe GRI should provide related guidance in the form of functional specifications, or criteria, for how to do so, in keeping with its charge of providing broad, non-prescriptive direction. This would leave open the door to innovation and competing methodologies for how to apply such context--procedurally--while maintaining a high degree of control over the meaning and interpretation of the Principle itself. Not all interpretations of Sustainability Context will necessarily be true to the purpose, intent, and role of the Principle in reporting, so the specification of criteria is key.

The full statement from the Sustainability Context Group includes a 5-part process that companies can use to assess, calculate, and report on sustainability context. The comment also provides two concrete examples (climate change and water) so that readers can see the Principle in practice.

Sustainability Context is near and dear to our heart (see What Sustainability Context Looks Like, Q&A with Mark McElroy, and The Brutal Truth about Sustainability Reporting) and so we are delighted to have the comment submitted publicly, and look forward to movement from GRI on this important topic.