GRI Global Conference Calls for a New Era

GRI seems to be the holy land of every CSR practitioner, for its Sustainability Reporting Guidelines (GRI Guidelines) brings about principles for defining report content (materiality, stakeholder inclusiveness, sustainability context, completeness) and principles for defining report quality (balance, comparability, accuracy, timeliness, clarity, reliability). GRI Guidelines influences the understanding of the CSR circles on information disclosure, transparency, materiality and other CSR management approaches. The update of GRI Guidelines has inspired CSR practitioners to pursue more in-depth exploration of CSR management.

2016 is a milestone of CSR development, for if all organizations refer to GRI Guidelines when conducting information disclosure, the report content should be subject to G4 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines (G4).

 

The 5th GRI Global Conference held in 2016

 
Therefore, the 5th GRI Global Conference 2016, held on May 18, should focus on G4 and shed light on it. However, this is not the key of the Conference, for GRI has done that in its day-to-day work. GRI chooses to discuss with all participants how to embrace the new era of information disclosure among enterprises.
 
GRI believes that in the new era, information disclosure should be digital, interactive and responsible in that enterprises’ efforts in social responsibility / sustainability disclosure could lead to the overall improvement of information disclosure quality.
 
Build Trust Relationship
 
Undoubtedly, the transparency of enterprises has improved tremendously. However, scandals at home and abroad recently indicate that enterprises should make efforts to build and consolidate the trust relationship with stakeholders.
 
In order to do so, we must continue to disclose CSR information and interact with stakeholders. This is an important channel for enterprises to improve management as well as an effective approach to enhance communication and reach consensus.
 
 
Report Value
 
Why do we prepare a CSR report? Who are the readers? These issues are always in our mind.
 
The report value lies in the insight brought by the report. People usually make decisions based on data and instinct. Therefore, CSR report should be one of the important sources of reliable data and the important basis for decision-makers to create the instinct.


“The value of sustainability report has transcended service benchmarking research and market competition." John Elkington, a speaker of the Conference said.
 

Ms. Dai Yibo, Deputy General Manager of GoldenBee CSR Consulting, pointed out that CSR has triggered Chinese enterprises' new thinking on enterprise transparency and business model transformation.

 
The Power of S & T
According to GoldenBee, China has released over 7,000 CSR reports. From a global view, the number of sustainability reports is even larger. However, unfortunately, the large amount of information hasn’t been fully used. It requires technology to understand, analyze and integrate the information.
 
Therefore, GRI established the GRI Technology Consortium at the end of 2015 to promote the transformation of business and policy making through sustainability information with the collected wisdom of global technological leaders.