For the first time in Italy, yesterday the new Guidelines (G4) of the GRI (Global Report Initiatives), developed in collaboration with KPMG, were presented at the Confindustria headquarters in viale dell'Astronomia, in Rome.
Indeed, GRI's objective is to trace and communicate a standard path for each sustainability reporting initiative. An increasing number of companies and organizations of all kinds, in fact, want to make their operations sustainable. Even more, expectations of long-term profitability that go hand in hand with social justice and environmental protection are gaining ground. These expectations can only grow and intensify as the need to move towards a truly sustainable economy is understood by lenders and customers of companies and organizations.
A sustainability report helps organizations set goals, measure performance and manage change in order to make their operations more sustainable by conveying information about an organization's impact on the environment, society and the economy. The crux is to make problems that may seem abstract or vague tangible and concrete, in order to assist shareholders, lenders and customers in understanding and managing the effects of sustainable growth, providing detailed information on the consequences of their actions.
This is the goal with which G4 was planned and developed. The guidelines of the GRI (Global Report Initiatives) are periodically reviewed to provide the best possible and most up-to-date guidance on sustainability. A key objective is also to set a recognized standard for writing such reports.
It is crucial for society and markets that these reports evolve in terms of content, and become standard practice. This version of the guidelines is more user-friendly than its predecessors and places particular emphasis on the need for organizations to focus the reporting and reporting process on topics critical to their business and their key partners, so that they can inform companies and markets in the best possible way on sustainability issues.
The Guidelines were developed through a very extensive process, which involved hundreds of technicians, users and intermediaries from all over the world. As a result G4 offers a globally relevant framework to support a standardized approach to reporting, encouraging the degree of transparency and density that is required to make information useful and credible to markets and societies. G4 is designed to be universally applicable by all organizations around the world, whether they are large or small. Like all GRI Guidelines, G4 includes references to widely accepted documents that are relevant or fundamental to a company's value statement, which should consequently be the focus of the integrated reports.
