The New GRI Standard Launched: A Brief Summary of Changes to Supply Chain Reporting

November 11, 2016 EcoVadis

Last month, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) launched their latest GRI Standards, designed to be a global best practice in sustainability reporting. This new version replaces the previous GRI G4 version. The standards are designed to be used as a set by organizations to report about their impacts on the economy, the environment, and society.
GRI did a great job providing tools to understand the new format, especially an Excel spreadsheet that provides an itemized list that maps G4 to the new Standards. This sheet also flags which standards have “revised disclosures” and provides a summary of the changes.
Here is a brief summary of the changes based on GRI’s spreadsheet showing the seven main items related specifically to supply chain:

For the GRI Standard Title “Supplier Social Assessment”, Standard ID 414

gri

(Note: this table summarizes the subset of disclosures that changed with the new GRI Standard. There are two more G4 disclosure G4-EN32 + G4-EN33 covering “Supplier Environmental Assessment”, but these were not changed)

In addition there is a minor clarification on scope 3 emissions (G4-EN17 / new Standard 305-3).
As well, G4-12 has been expanded to be more specific on the reporting expectations to include “a description of the organization’s supply chain, including its main elements as they relate to the organization’s activities, primary brands, products, and services.”

GRI provides an excellent framework and guideline for CSR reporting, and more generally, reporting on non-financial information (NFI) which is becoming an increasingly common practice at many companies. This is being accelerated by various regulations such as the EU reporting directive, UK Modern slavery, California Transparency Act, all of which specifically address third-parties such as supplier. To learn more how you can get the right supply chain data for your reporting, contact us.

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