The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) announced plans to launch a new Sustainability Innovation Lab (SIL), with the IFRS Foundation as its convening partner; this is a new initiative aimed at enabling companies to meet evolving sustainability disclosure requirements.
This comes as companies face a “sustainability capacity and expertise gap” amid increasing requirements to report on their sustainability performance across the value chain, according to GRI CEO Eelco van der Enden.
GRI Sustainability Reporting Standards are some of the most widely accepted global standards for companies’ sustainability reporting, developed to enable consistent reporting across companies and industries, and provide clearer communication to stakeholders regarding sustainability matters. The GRI published a major update of the standards in 2021.
The IFRS Foundation’s International Sustainability Standard Board (ISSB) launched its inaugural general sustainability (IFRS 1) and climate (IFRS 2) reporting standards in June 2023, and the new standards are expected to inform emerging disclosure requirement systems of a number of global regulators.
According to the GRI, the new SIL will bring together global and local partners to advance reporting capabilities using the GRI Standards and the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards, providing an opportunity for collaboration with GRI and ISSB representatives and other key stakeholders to identify emerging sustainability disclosure topics and develop concepts, best practices and data-driven solutions. The SIL will also provide capacity building support to supply-chain participants that are required to meet new information demands.
The SIL will be based in Singapore and be initially supported by offices in Asia, operated by the GRI ASEAN Network and managed by a steering committee led by senior representatives from the GRI and the IFRS Foundation. The organisations added that working groups are being established to focus on four priority areas: digital taxonomies, audit and assurance, smaller companies, and public-sector reporting.
Source: GRI, IFRS announce initiative to help companies build sustainability reporting capacity – ESG Today
About the Authors
Associate Director, Investment Banking
Prachurjya has over 16 years of experience in investment banking with Acuity Knowledge Partners. At Acuity, he has led sector and product-specialist pilot teams across Capital Markets, ESG, Debt Advisory, Loan Syndications, Metals & Mining and Real Estate. He has been actively involved in setting up and on-boarding new ESG Advisory, ESG DCM and Sustainable Finance teams for various bulge bracket investment banks. Within DCM and Rating Advisory, he has been instrumental in helping the clients achieve over 30% in annual savings on both regular and adhoc tasks through standardization of the outputs and deployment of our proprietary BEAT tools.
Delivery Manager, Investment Banking
Puja has 6 years of extensive experience in ESG, Climate Change & Sustainability and she is supervising the ESG team at Acuity. She also has diverse experience in conducting ESIA, EHS compliance audits, ESG Risks and Controls, EHS & ESG Due Diligence assessments. Prior to joining Acuity, she was working with companies like KPMG Global Services, EY India and ERM India. She has expertise in provisioning extensive research requirements for clients through preparation of Peer Benchmarking, Target Compilation, Sustainability report, Sustainable Finance Updates and Sectoral ESG Thematic Detailing Engagement.
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