Today GRI announced Bloomberg LP as Lead Media Partner for the 5th GRI Global Conference taking place from 18 – 20 May 2016 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The GRI Conference, which already has more than 100 expert speakers confirmed, attracts more than 1,500 sustainability leaders from around the world. It will provide three days of thought provoking plenaries and sessions, with a focus on how technology can leverage sustainability information to empower better strategic decision making to address the world’s critical sustainability issues.

“The GRI Global Conference brings together global thought and action leaders who are committed to transforming the way that non-financial information is used to enable strategic decision making, and we are proud to be a media sponsor. Their goals and ours are well aligned – we both believe sustainability efforts are a business as well as a strategic priority. We also have a shared commitment of connecting key decision makers to dynamic networks of information, people and ideas to help further this very necessary and important dialogue,” explained Peter Grauer, Chairman of Bloomberg LP

Bloomberg’s Sustainability Editor, Eric Roston, will be hosting the entire conference. Eric oversees coverage of energy, climate change and natural resources for Bloomberg.com, and is the author of the critically-acclaimed book ‘THE CARBON AGE: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat’. Eric also served as a senior analyst on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, and at Duke University’s climate change policy think tank, the Nicholas Institute.

Says Roston, “Transparency is oxygen for markets. The more there is, the better everybody can breathe. The Global Reporting Initiative has spent nearly two decades making it easier for companies to disclose their performance across dozens of previously overlooked categories. The result is dramatically more transparency, exactly where 21st century investors increasingly need it.”

Leading high-profile speakers including Linda Kromjong, Secretary General, International Organization of Employers; Elisabeth Dahlin, Secretary General, Save the Children Sweden; and Dante Pesce, UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, will power the Conference discussions and provide their own expert insights.

A key aim of the GRI Global Conference is to help enable business contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through GRI’s G4 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines and the SDG Compass to demonstrate the importance of collaboration to empower this shift.

High level Plenaries such as ‘20 years on Are we making a Difference?’ ‘Innovation for Sustainable Development: the role of private sector collaboration’, ‘Using Sustainability Data to Enable Transformational Change’ and ‘Trust & Transparency: building better business and policy worldwide’ will specifically target SDGs 8, 12, 16 and 17 with many other in depth sessions addressing SDGs  5, 9, 10 and 13.

“GRI has pioneered sustainability reporting over the last two decades, and one of our focus areas is collaboration and innovation,” explains Michael Meehan, GRI Chief Executive. “We’re cultivating exciting partnerships with organizations outside of the sustainability reporting field to really spark the innovations needed to take us into the next era of corporate transparency and empowered decision making. The media partnership with Bloomberg is an ideal opportunity to raise the profile of sustainability reporting around the world and to tap into their ‘big data’ knowledge and expertise.”