What does the GRI do?

At its core, GRI helps organizations answer a fundamental question: “What impact do we have on the world and what are we doing about it?”

Sustainability is no longer a niche initiative—it’s a central business imperative. For businesses, governments, and other entities aiming to measure their environmental and social impacts, communicate their values, and meet rising stakeholder expectations, transparency is everything.

That’s where sustainability reporting comes in. But with a growing number of frameworks and regulations, many sustainability leaders are asking, “Where do we begin and how do we ensure our reporting is credible?”

What are GRI Standards?

GRI Reporting Standards are a globally recognized set of guidelines to help organizations communicate their ESG impact consistently and credibly. GRI Standards serve as the foundation for sustainability reporting for thousands of organizations worldwide—across industries, sectors, and sizes—and provide a structured approach for:

• Identifying material sustainability issues most relevant to an organization and its stakeholders.
• Measuring and disclosing ESG performance in a transparent, comparable format.
• Improving decision-making by highlighting risks, opportunities, and areas for improvement.
• Communicating impact to stakeholders, including regulators, investors, customers, and employees.

In essence, GRI Standards turn abstract goals like “improve sustainability” into actionable disclosures, complete with defined indicators, guidance, and metrics.

GRI Reporting Standards are modular—adaptable to different types of organizations and industries—and fall into three main categories.

1. Universal Standards

These form the foundation for all reporting and include:

• GRI 1: Foundation: Principles and requirements for using GRI Reporting Standards.
• GRI 2: General Disclosures: Information about the organization’s structure, governance, policies, and practices.
• GRI 3: Material Topics: How the organization determines and manages its most significant ESG impacts.

2. Sector Standards

Tailored to specific industries—for example, oil and gas, agriculture, textiles—these identify the most likely material impacts in each sector, helping organizations focus on what’s most relevant.

3. Topic Standards

These cover specific sustainability issues, such as energy, water, waste, human rights, and more. Organizations select Topic Standards that correspond to their identified material topics.

This flexible, modular structure allows organizations—whether small logistics providers or multinational manufacturers—to tailor their disclosures based on operations and materiality, enabling precise, comprehensive, and relevant reporting without unnecessary complexity.

GRI Reporting Standards in practice

Using GRI Standards typically follows a multi-step process:

• Assess material topics through stakeholder engagement and internal analysis.
• Select applicable standards based on the topics and sector(s) involved.
• Collect data from across the organization—often from finance, HR, operations, supply chain, and IT systems.
• Prepare disclosures using the prescribed indicators and guidance.
• Publish the sustainability report, ideally on an annual basis.

GRI Standards are rigorous but accessible, encouraging both first-time reporters and seasoned sustainability teams to participate.

Why does the GRI matter?

Founded in 1997, the GRI pioneered the first global standards for sustainability reporting. Today, those standards are highly respected and widely regarded as the world's most used environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting framework. Thousands of organizations in more than 100 countries—from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies—use the GRI and GRI Standards to understand and disclose information on their ESG impact.

Understanding the Global Reporting Initiative

The GRI stands apart from other frameworks because of its impact-based approach. Rather than focusing solely on financial risks, as some ESG frameworks do, GRI emphasizes impact materiality, which is how an organization affects the environment, people, and society. This emphasis makes the GRI particularly useful for organizations that want to build trust with stakeholders, go beyond compliance, and tell a broader sustainability story.

The GRI framework is grounded in principles such as:

• Stakeholder inclusiveness: Identifying and addressing the concerns of people and groups affected by the organization
• Sustainability context: Reporting performance in the broader context of environmental and social thresholds
• Materiality: Focusing on the most significant impacts
• Completeness: Ensuring reports reflect all relevant impacts across time and geography

Notably, the GRI is aligned with double materiality, a key concept in the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). This alignment means the GRI supports disclosures that reflect both how sustainability issues affect an organization’s financial health and how its operations affect society and the environment.

GRI reporting: A key to transparent sustainability disclosures

Transparency is increasingly a strategic asset. Investors want it. Regulators demand it. Consumers expect it.

GRI reporting enables organizations to share their sustainability journey clearly and credibly. Its emphasis on impact—not just financial outcomes—helps organizations:

• Build trust with stakeholders by showing they take sustainability seriously.
• Demonstrate accountability with specific, measurable disclosures.
• Benchmark performance year over year and against peers.
• Meet regulatory and voluntary reporting requirements with a single, globally recognized framework.

For example, reporting emissions isn’t just about meeting climate goals. It can show customers and investors that your organization is managing risks, investing in innovation, and thinking long-term.

Looking forward, GRI reporting won’t just be about publishing a report once a year—it will be about continuous transparency and actionable insights that drive business performance.

How to incorporate GRI Reporting Standards into daily operations

GRI reporting doesn’t have to be just an annual exercise: Organizations that integrate GRI principles into their operations can gain more value and insight from their efforts.

To embed the GRI reporting into day-to-day business:

• Integrate ESG KPIs into enterprise systems—for example, ERP, HR, and supply chain—to collect and track data regularly.
• Assign responsibility for material topics to functional leads or cross-functional ESG teams.
• Use GRI-aligned metrics to inform business planning, risk assessments, and product development.
• Incorporate GRI principles into procurement, governance, and employee engagement policies.
• Automate data flows with ERP-centric tools to enable near real-time reporting and performance tracking.
• Report progress quarterly or monthly to leadership teams, not just annually.

By making sustainability reporting part of everyday workflows, companies can shift from reactive compliance to proactive strategy—aligning operations with long-term sustainability goals.

Evolution of the GRI and GRI Reporting Standards

Originally created in response to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, the GRI sought to establish a consistent way for organizations to report environmental and social impacts.

Key milestones include:

• 2000: First version of GRI Guidelines launched
• 2006: G3 Guidelines released, expanding scope and depth
• 2016: Transition from Guidelines to formal GRI Standards
• 2021: Major update introduces the latest Universal Standards
• Ongoing: Continued collaboration with global regulators, standard-setters, and industry groups

This evolution reflects the growing sophistication of sustainability reporting—and the increasingly central role it plays in corporate strategy.

How GRI reporting supports corporate sustainability goals

The GRI framework supports corporate sustainability goals by providing a globally recognized structure for consistent, transparent, and stakeholder-relevant ESG reporting. It helps organizations not only meet disclosure requirements but also use sustainability data as a tool for strategy, engagement, and long-term value creation.

Specifically, GRI Standards support these goals by:

• Clarifying priorities by identifying, assessing, and prioritizing the ESG issues most relevant—or “material”—to a business and its stakeholders.
• Guiding data collection with clear indicators and metrics.
• Enabling internal collaboration between sustainability, finance, and IT teams.
• Improving stakeholder engagement by demonstrating transparency and responsiveness.
• Driving continuous improvement through year-over-year performance tracking.

Organizations using the GRI might find it easier to set meaningful sustainability targets, assess their progress, and tell a compelling story to customers, employees, and investors.

The role of sustainability software in GRI reporting

Sustainability reporting is data intensive. ESG data often lives across multiple systems—finance, HR, procurement, operations—and comes in varying formats and levels of quality.

This is where ERP-centric platforms play a vital role. By integrating ESG data collection into your core enterprise resource planning systems, these platforms help:

• Improve accuracy and consistency by centralizing ESG data.
• Reduce manual entry errors and automate calculations.
• Ensure audit readiness with version control and traceability.
• Enable seamless reporting by mapping data to the GRI and other frameworks.
• Track progress and identify gaps through real-time dashboards.

In short, using the right technology can turn GRI reporting from a manual burden into a strategic advantage.

GRI reporting versus other sustainability frameworks

With a growing number of sustainability standards and frameworks, it’s essential for sustainability leaders to understand how they differ, when to use each, and how to respond when a framework updates.

While many organizations use multiple frameworks to satisfy various stakeholder requirements—and the GRI often serves as the foundation because of its broad coverage and adaptability—each one has its own strengths, focus areas, and ideal use cases.

How to get started with GRI reporting

If your organization is new to the GRI, begin with a few practical steps.

1. Understand the GRI Standards: Explore the Universal, Sector, and Topic Standards relevant to your organization.
2. Identify stakeholders: Engage internal and external groups to understand their concerns and priorities.
3. Conduct a materiality assessment: Determine which sustainability topics are most important to your organization and stakeholders.
4. Gather and validate ESG data: Use internal systems, supplier data, and ERP-centric platforms to collect consistent information.
5. Create the report: Align content with the GRI structure and clearly communicate your methodology and performance.
6. Review, publish, and improve: Make the report accessible, invite feedback, and use insights to guide future action.

It’s often helpful to start small—perhaps focusing on a few key topics—then expand your disclosures over time.

The future of GRI reporting

As sustainability expectations rise, so does the importance of future-ready ESG strategies. The GRI is evolving to meet this challenge through:

• More robust Sector Standards tailored to high-impact industries.
• Alignment with regulations like the CSRD and the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB).
• Digital-first reporting and machine-readable disclosures.
• Collaboration with technology providers to support real-time ESG intelligence.

As sustainability reporting becomes more data driven and time sensitive, the role of emerging technologies—especially AI and advanced analytics—is rapidly growing. The future of GRI reporting will be shaped not just by evolving standards, but by how organizations collect, process, and act on ESG data in real time.

AI and automation will reduce manual workloads

One of the biggest challenges in GRI reporting is the manual effort required to gather, clean, and organize ESG data from across the organization. AI can transform this process by:

• Automatically extracting data from source systems like finance, HR, supply chain, and energy management platforms.
• Identifying patterns and anomalies, such as missing data points or inconsistent units across departments.
• Tagging and categorizing ESG metrics to align with the appropriate GRI Standards or topic areas.
• Recommending disclosures based on previous reporting cycles, peer benchmarks, or regulatory changes.

For example, instead of manually calculating Scope 2 emissions from utility bills, an AI-enabled system could ingest meter data directly, normalize it across locations, and produce a GRI-aligned disclosure with supporting documentation.

Similarly, AI can assist with drafting narrative sections of a report—like management disclosures or stakeholder engagement summaries—by analyzing internal documentation and highlighting key talking points.

Advanced analytics will transform reporting into insights

Where AI helps with automation, analytics helps with strategy. By applying dashboards, scenario modeling, and predictive tools to your ESG data, you can move beyond compliance and toward performance optimization.

Analytics supports next-generation GRI reporting through:

• Real-time tracking of sustainability KPIs like emissions intensity, workforce diversity, or water use.
• Benchmarking against industry peers or regulatory targets.
• Root cause analysis to understand why performance on a material topic trends up or down.
• Scenario modeling to test the impact of operational changes on ESG outcomes—for example, switching suppliers or changing energy sources.
• Forecasting tools to anticipate future risks and opportunities related to sustainability goals.

For instance, if GRI reporting shows that an organization’s waste output has increased year-over-year, analytics can help determine whether the cause is a shift in production, supplier behavior, or packaging materials—and what interventions will have the greatest impact.

A continuous, digital-first approach will enable always-on sustainability

AI and analytics are also pushing GRI reporting beyond the traditional “annual PDF” model. In the near future, expect to see more:

• Interactive digital reports with embedded data visualizations and real-time updates.
• API-based ESG data sharing with regulators, rating agencies, and investors.
• Machine-readable disclosures that align with global taxonomies and streamline audits.
• Integrated ESG and financial dashboards that give leadership a holistic view of performance.

This shift toward continuous, tech-enabled reporting means that sustainability performance is no longer a once-a-year exercise—it becomes an always-on part of the organization, tracked with the same rigor as financials.

Report with integrity, act with purpose, lead with impact

To transform ESG data into meaningful disclosures and sustainable change, it’s critical for IT and sustainability leaders to understand and apply GRI Reporting Standards.

Now is the time to explore the GRI, assess your readiness, and consider how ERP-centric solutions can help you streamline the process. Transparent reporting isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s a smart move for the future of your organization.

SAP sustainability customers in action