The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has launched a new biodiversity standard for supporting organisations in assessing their impacts on biodiversity, as stakeholder demand for nature-related disclosures gains traction.

The GRI 101 standard replaces the GRI 304 standard on biodiversity, which was launched in 2016. The Amsterdam-based standard organisation will pilot the new recommendations with early adopters over the next two years, and large-scale reporting expected to start from Jan. 1, 2026.

“The updated GRI standard sets a new bar for transparency on biodiversity impacts,” said Carol Adams, GRI Global Sustainability Standards Board (GSSB) chair. 

“It will support detailed, location-specific reporting, both within an organisation’s operations and throughout its supply chain, ensuring stakeholders can assess how impacts on biodiversity are mitigated and reduced. Identifying and managing an organisation’s most significant impacts is critical to understanding dependencies and risks.” 

Building on the work of the Science Based Target Network (SBTN) and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), GRI 101 seeks to deliver:

• Transparency throughout the supply chain
• Location-specific reporting on impacts
• New disclosures on the direct drivers of biodiversity loss
• Requirements for reporting impacts on people

The standard introduces three new management disclosures aimed at showing how an organisation is grappling with biodiversity related issues.

As a first step, GRI adopters are required to outline their policies to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, explain how these are underpinned by the organisation’s activities, and detail their no net loss or net gain targets.

Organisations should then describe the initiatives put in place to manage their most relevant impacts on biodiversity, both at the site level and across the supply chain, including reporting how they apply the mitigation hierarchy.

While offsetting can be used as a last resort to address negative impacts that could not be avoided or minimised, GRI encourages taking actions to boost biodiversity beyond the management of negative impacts.

The third management disclosure focuses on access and benefit sharing (ABS) measures, with organisations required to outline how they ensure that the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs) are respected.

“When countries lack ABS regulations and measures, an organisation can still take action to share the benefits arising from its use of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge fairly and equitably,” GRI said in its recommendations. 

FIVE TOPIC DISCLOSURES

Under the new standard, organisations commit to disclosing details on five main topics:

• Identification of biodiversity impacts 
• Locations with biodiversity impacts 
• Direct drivers of biodiversity loss 
• Changes to the state of biodiversity 
• Ecosystem services 

Recommendations include providing information about the locations and activities with the most significant impacts on biodiversity, as well as the direct drivers of habitat or species loss, such as land and sea use change, exploitation of natural resources, and emissions of air, water, and soil pollutants.

GRI disclosures should also highlight how specific activities are leading – or can potentially lead – to changes in the condition of biodiversity through a holistic approach encompassing genes, species, and ecosystems.

“The organisation can use methods that directly measure characteristics or estimate ecosystem conditions based on direct drivers,” GRI said. 

“These methods can be specific to certain types of ecosystems (e.g., types of wetlands or forests) or applicable to different ecosystem types (i.e., applicable across terrestrial, freshwater, or marine realms).”

Since a change in the state of biodiversity can affect ecosystem services, such as water flows, the regulation of climate, and pollination, they should be addressed in the disclosure, according to the recommendations.

“The organisation should also list the ecosystem services and beneficiaries affected or potentially affected by its suppliers’ activities,” GRI said.

ALIGNING WITH TNFD

Nature-related disclosures are gathering momentum worldwide, as 320 companies recently committed to adopting TNFD recommendations within two years, the task force announced at the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos in mid-January.

“TNFD collaborated closely with GRI with the aim to simplify and align the TNFD recommendations and GRI standards”, said Tony Goldner, executive director of the TNFD, calling the new GRI standard an “important milestone in improving transparency in support of a global effort to safeguard biodiversity”.

GRI standard relies on TNFD and SBTN for a number of disclosures, including identifying biodiversity impacts and locating where impacts are most likely to be present and significant.

“The new standard arrives at a time when biodiversity is on a precipice,” GRI said, stressing the critical role of risks and dependencies assessments in bending the biodiversity loss curve and meeting the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity (GBF) targets.

“Understanding the impacts that organisations have is a crucial aspect of implementing global solutions to halt and even reverse the damage and address existential threats,” said Adams.

Under the GBF, agreed in 2022 at the COP15 UN biodiversity summit in 2022, countries committed to protecting at least 30% of land and sea by 2030. 

Notably, the target 15 of the agreement calls on businesses to “regularly monitor, assess, and transparently disclose their risks, dependencies, and impacts on biodiversity”.

By Sergio Colombo – sergio@carbon-pulse.com

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