Courtesy : sustainlab.co

Sustainable standard

There’s a lot to know when it comes to sustainability standards. Luckily, we’re here to help you keep track of it all. In this post we will be covering the best-known and most widely-used sustainability standards, including:

1. Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
2. Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB)
3. ISO 14001
4. Integrated Reporting

Of course, the standards alone are not enough, you also need to set sustainability goals. That’s why we will look at:

• Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
• Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi)

Buckle up.

1. What are the GRI Standards?

We’ll start with the most-used standards for sustainability reporting, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards.

The goals of GRI are twofold. The non-profit aims to:

1. Help organizations take responsibility for their impacts, and
2. Establish a global, common language through which organizations can communicate those impacts.

GRI has created the GRI Standards, which are designed to help organizations like yours prepare and report information related to your environmental, social, and economic impacts. The GRI Standards are freely available to the public, so that any organization can use them to increase their transparency to stakeholders.

The GRI Standards are divided into four groups: the 100 Series or the “Universal Standards,” and three topic-specific Standards: the 200 Series (economic), the 300 Series (environmental), and the 400 Series (social).

Overview of the GRI Standards, source: GRI

Here’s a quick run-down:

1. The Universal Standards

As the name suggests, the Universal Standards are applicable to all reporting organizations, including yours. The Universal Standards include:

• Foundations, which explains the GRI Standards system and how to use them
• General Disclosures, which entails providing details about, among other things, the organization and its reporting practices, activities, and governance.
• Material Topics, which is about identifying the material topics of the reporting organization, in other words, the topics that reflect the organization’s most significant impacts on the environment, people, and economy.

2. The 200 Series: Economy

The 200 Series centers around economic sustainability. The 200 Series is not about the financial condition of the organization itself, but rather the impact that the organization has on the economic conditions of its stakeholders and on the economic systems at a local, national, and global level. Some of the economic topics include anti-competitive behavior, tax, and anti-corruption.

3. The 300 Series: Environment

The 300 Series is all about the environment, specifically, the organization’s impacts on natural systems, such as land, water, air, and ecosystems. Some of the environmental topics include emissions, biodiversity, and waste.

4. The 400 Series: Social Systems

The 400 Series focuses on how the organization impacts the social systems surrounding it. Some of the social topics include non-discrimination, child labor, and customer privacy.

In closing, using the GRI Standards will allow your organization to publicly disclose your most significant sustainability impacts and how you manage them, in a way that is in accordance with a universally-accepted standard.

2. What are the SASB Standards?

The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), has published standards with the goal of developing the market standard for the disclosure of sustainability information to investors. Out of all the information that could be used to communicate to all the various stakeholders of a company, such as customers, employees, and regulators, SASB focuses on the subset of information that impacts the organization’s financial performance.

SASB recognizes that different industries may have different ways of solving the same sustainability issues. Therefore, SASB has created different standards for 77 different industries such as the consumer goods, health care, and transportation industries.

The standards cover issues relating to five sustainability dimensions including environment, social capital, human capital, business model and innovation, and leadership and governance. Each of the dimensions contains a number of subtopics, such as air quality, human rights, and competitive behavior, totaling about 30 issues. From these 30 issues, the ones most likely to impact financial performance in a given industry are identified.

So, what’s included in the standards themselves? Each industry standard includes an average of 6 disclosure topics related to the most relevant sustainability dimensions for that industry. The disclosure topics are accompanied by:

• A definition of the disclosure topic,
• Accounting metrics for each disclosure topic,
• A technical protocol that provides guidance on how to compile the data, and
• Activity metrics for normalizing the data.

In summary: using the SASB standards can help your company become more transparent about its sustainability as it relates to financial performance in a way that is specific to your industry.