The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has launched an initiative to steer companies in aligning disclosures under its framework with the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS).

Under the GRI-ESRS linkage service, GRI will provide feedback to reporting organisations, outlining areas in which their disclosures do or do not align with the EU’s standards, in a bid to prioritise data collection efforts.

“The sustainability reporting landscape is fast evolving, and understandably, there are questions from reporters and other stakeholders about GRI’s central role,” said Peter Paul van de Wijs, chief policy officer of GRI.

“Most large companies, in the EU and elsewhere, already report with GRI. It is hugely reassuring that they can apply their existing disclosure practices to meet ESRS requirements.”

Approximately 50,000 organisations subject to the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will be required to start disclosing information about their environmental, social, and governance practices from 2025, using a set of 12 ESRS standards.

The ESRS standard on biodiversity and ecosystems prescribes metrics focusing on the hectares of sites owned, leased, or managed in or near biodiversity-sensitive areas that the company is negatively affecting.

REMAINING GAPS

While GRI and the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG), the independent advisory body that oversees ESRS, said last September the two frameworks have reached a high degree of interoperability, there remain some gaps that the newly launched service intends to address.

Under the initiative, companies will receive support structuring their ESRS sustainability statement, as well as a list of all the data points in the EU’s mandatory framework that are not covered by GRI’s 40 standards, including the 101 biodiversity impact standard released in January.

Although the GRI standards and ESRS both focus on the material impacts of a company’s activities, the latter also encompasses how sustainability topics relate to the organisation’s financial health.

Disclosure alignment is regarded as key to ensuring transparency as it affects comparability of biodiversity data, at a time when pressure is mounting on companies and financial institutions to assess and disclose their risks and dependencies on nature.

A report published by the EU Business & Biodiversity (B&B) Platform in April flagged the differences between the most prominent biodiversity disclosure initiatives, including GRI, ESRS, and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) recommendations.

GRI and ESRS have recently launched separate initiatives to map out their interoperability with the TNFD framework.

By Sergio Colombo – sergio@carbon-pulse.com

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