GRI urges companies’ high quality disclosure of biodiversity impact

25 / 05 / 2022

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The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) urged high quality disclosure of companies on their impact on biodiversity and climate change.

Holding organizations accountable for their impacts is crucial to break the chain of events on both biodiversity loss and climate change — for which transparency is the underpinning enabler, Harold Pauwels, GRI Director of Standards, wrote in an article published on GRI website.

Not only will high quality disclosures lead to better assessment by companies, it will also inform improved decision making by stakeholders, including governments, civil society, and investors.

However, current disclosure is not consistent, or sufficient. As the KPMG Survey of Sustainability Reporting found, less than a quarter of large companies at risk from biodiversity loss disclose on the topic. A revised reporting standard, therefore, can enable many more businesses to address their role in biodiversity, and meet stakeholder expectations for transparency.

GRI’s Global Sustainability Standards Board (GSSB) initiated the review of GRI 304: Biodiversity 2016 in order to provide an updated standard that reflects the global best practice for biodiversity reporting, supporting more organizations to show accountability for their impacts. The revision of the Standard is supported by a 18-member Technical Committee, ensuring multi-stakeholder expertise.

The GRI Biodiversity Standard is already used annually by at least 2,000 organizations, out of the more than 10,000 companies reporting with the GRI Standards — the world’s most widely used sustainability reporting standards.

The proposed revisions will help organizations to better report their impacts throughout the value chain, including how they contribute to key drivers of biodiversity loss (climate change, invasive species, land and sea use change, overexploitation and pollution).

Building on existing disclosures, the draft standard reiterates the importance of location-specific reporting. It is also expected to enable organizations to report actions using the mitigation hierarchy, a best practice approach to managing negative impacts to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.

“The challenges we face to address and reverse societal impacts on biodiversity are formidable. Yet I firmly believe that improved transparency by organizations will drive the actions that contribute to the changes that we urgently need to see,” he concluded the article.