TEMPLATE A    Creating a    positive    impression TEMPLATE B    The business    case for    sustainable    development

Objective: Standardize information collection on company sustainability

Audience: general public, shareholders

Availability: current tendency to web-only reports allows year-round updates and reduces use of paper.

1. CEO statement — GRI does not require specific elements to be covered but recommends a number of issues be addressed such as acknowledgment of successes and failures, performance against benchmarks and major industry challenges.
2. Profile of reporting organization — includes company characteristics such as number of employees, description of business activities, where stock is traded.
3. Executive Summary and Key Indicators
   - the specified generally applicable environmental performance indicators (e.g. total energy use, total materials use other than fuels or water)
   - selected organisation-specific environmental performance indicators (e.g. company initiatives to move towards renewable energy sources and energy efficiency, use of recycled materials with pre- versus post- consumer use distinctions)
   - selected economic performance indicators (e.g. net profits/earnings/income, investments in research and development, debt/equity ratio)
   - selected social performance indicators (e.g. employee retention rates, ratio of jobs offered to jobs accepted, investment per work in illness and injury prevention)
   -selected integrated performance indicators (e.g. total materials used during a product's life cycle expressed relative to globally sustainable levels measured in terms of resource availability and/or biophysical or assimilative capacity).
4. Vision and Strategy — outlines the company's vision for the future and how it will manage the challenges associated with economic, environmental and social performance.
5. Policies, Organization and Management — includes the company's mission statement, explanations of how the precautionary principles is represented in company policies, management systems in place and current stakeholder relationships.
6. Performance Indicators — this section should present more indicators (quantitative and qualitative) in the categories described in Step 3.

The guidelines are the result of several years of cross-sectoral cooperation to identify a methodology for reporting on sustainability. They rely on the types of data that are often already collected for other purposes. The aim is to gain a better understanding of what sustainability means by developing a standard approach that will allow for comparison.

The guidelines are biased towards environmental information, reflecting both the emphasis placed on a healthy ecosystem by those who developed them and the difficulty of tracking social and economic information in a corporate context.

Policy is the cornerstone of the GRI approach. For the most part, it overlooks the connection between management policy and operational implementation that is vital to presenting a complete picture of progress on company sustainability.

The GRI recognizes the importance of including more integrated indicators, such as ones that link across company divisions or identify connections between local operations and global conditions. This area is not yet well-developed.