GRI publishes paper on future trends in sustainability reporting
The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has published an analysis paper titled ‘Sustainability and Reporting Trends in 2025: Preparing for the Future’. The paper, which is the first to be published as part of GRI’s 2025 Reporting Project, examines future trends in sustainability and corporate reporting and disclosure.
Looking ahead to the sustainability and reporting trends of 2025, GRI’s Reporting 2025 project aims to facilitate discussion around the future of reporting. Based on the analysis of a series of interviews conducted, this paper examines the key decisions businesses will focus on in the next decade in order to transition to a sustainable economy; and how disclosure and reporting should be shaped to support decision makers in this process.
The paper identifies several trends that indicate how disclosure will evolve in the next decade. These trends include:
- Companies will be held accountable, more than ever before
- Business decision makers will take sustainability issues into account more profoundly
- Technology will enable companies and stakeholders to access, collate, check, analyse and correlate data
- Technology will enable companies to operate and report in a highly integrated way
- Ethical values, reputation and risk management will guide decision makers
- New indicators will emerge
- Reports will result both from regulated and voluntary processes
- Sustainability data will be digital
You can download a copy of the first Reporting 2025 analysis paper from the GRI website here. The next paper will be published in September 2015, with a final publication due in January 2016.
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