The GRI Board of Directors made an important decision in October: GRI will start working on a new version of the GRI Guidelines – the GRI G4 Reporting Guidelines – to be ready by the end of 2012.
In line with our mission to mainstream ESG reporting, a key aim of the G4 Guidelines is to harmonize Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and sustainability reporting practices around the world. In order to be fit for mainstreaming, the G4 Guidelines will need to be “standard ready”; robust enough to support higher levels of assurance and help companies to produce reports that are trusted by markets and stakeholders.

The current sustainability challenges and the digital era are creating an unprecedented demand for information, to give a real overview of business performance. GRI is convinced that this can be achieved if harmonization of current standards starts, increasing transparency through comparability.

Another key aim for G4 is to be a stepping stone for companies preparing an integrated report based on the framework currently in development by the International Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC).

An integrated report presents information about an organization’s financial performance with information about its ESG performance in an integrated way. It gives long and short term investors and other stakeholders information to assess a company’s performance in all of these areas.

As the developers of the world’s most widely used sustainability reporting guidelines, GRI co-leads and participates in the development of the IIRC framework. The GRI Guidelines shape the ESG content for the integrated reporting architecture developed by the IIRC.

GRI counts on the participation and engagement of its networks and other members of the reporting community to achieve these goals.