GRI and SASB are collaborating. Is that excellent news for corporations?

GRI and SASB are collaborating. Is that good information for fellowships? Joel Makower Sun, 07/12/ 2020 – 17:56

For times, corporate reporters — those inside firms responsible for creating sustainability reports and financial reporting environmental, social and governance data to many other organizations — ought to have disheartened by what many referred back to as an alphabet soup of standards and frameworks: CDP, GRI, IIRC, PRI, SASB, TCFD, UNGC and more.

And while they growled at how those various organizations’ entreaties weren’t matched, they dutifully be adhered to their requests and mandates.

Finally, facilitate may be on the way.

Today, two of those organizations — GRI, formerly the Global Reporting Initiative, and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, better known as SASB — are announcing a collaborative effort to help ease that embarrassment and , not insignificantly, stance their standards as “the worlds largest” consequential.

“Our basic SASB 101 tar that we give to everyone we speak to talks about SASB and GRI as being complementary, however never could break through into the public sphere with that content, ” SASB CEO Janine Guillot told me. “It was always this conflict narrative, which was extremely frustrating.”

The “conflict narrative” wasn’t without foundation. For years, the two organizations emulated for courtesy and preeminence among corporate reporters, NGOs and the mainstream investor community. Sometimes it get contentious. For sample, at a sustainability reporting seminar in Singapore last-place fall, the CEOs of GRI and SASB “traded barbs over whose was the superior standard, “ according to news reports — a “showdown, “ as sustainability reporting professional Elaine Cohen announced it.

For times, the two organizations rivalled for attending and reign. Sometimes it went contentious.

At the happening, SASB’s then-CEO Madelyn Antoncic announced GRI too difficult for investors to understand and for companies to compare their performance with peers. GRI CEO Tim Mohin pointed out that its standard exploited by 75 percent of the world’s largest firms. “With those amounts, I don’t see how what SASB is saying can be true, ” he said.

But that was so last year. SASB has a brand-new CEO — Guillot — who joined SASB five years ago after a decade on the investing side with Barclays and CalPERS, and who comes down to her CEO job with a strong working relationship with Mohin. Now, the two are in lockstep — babe gradations for now — to help the customers of sustainability data “understand the affinities and differences in the information made from these standards, ” according to a joint instruct document.

The time may be ripe for such a collaboration, for several reasonableness. One is the growing focus on sustainability and environmental, social and governance( ESG) metrics by the mainstream investment community, creating a greater need for a determine of reigning standards to surface. If there was any question about current trends, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink cast away all disbelieves in his annual shareholder letter, which referenced SASB and TCFD, the reporting framework created by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures.

Such agreed metrics are needed even within corporations, where sustainability agencies are connected to far better stakeholders.

“You’ve got a much broader base of people who are interested in talking about these topics, coming from a much broader array of self-disciplines, ” said Mohin, including “an investor relations being, a corporate secretary, a general counsel, a financial controller, a marketing communications being and an HR person. All of a sudden, you’ve got to bring together these multidisciplinary squads within both companies and investors. And that goes all the way up to the board, since boards of directors are now interested in these topics.”

Of course, outside the corporation is another small military of interested groups — clients, hires, regulators, etc. — seeking easily understandable and analogous data about companies’ sustainability performance.

And then there’s COVID.

“If the COVID-1 9 pandemic has showed us anything, it’s that nonfinancial revealing is very meaningful from a world business perspective, and that the concept of what is financially material and what is considered not financially substance is a very dynamic thing, ” Mohin explained. “We led from the issues that are important in a pandemic being sort of down the directory to being front and center overnight. And now we have the issues of ethnic justice and inequality front and middle. We’ve seen how the events of the world can change that interpretation for a company awfully, very quickly, which I think is one of the very important themes now of why GRI and SASB need to work together.”

The pandemic has put into sharper focus a number of aspects of corporate recital, including business contributions to biodiversity loss and the resulting increased potential for disease outbreaks; and the is necessary that more resilient ply chains, particularly for crucial goods such as food and prescription, as Guillot pointed out recently on GreenBiz.

Harmony and collaboration

For now, the two organizations’ work together will focus on going into the marketplace with harmonized, complementary messages. One aim, Mohin said, is to “understand how the different standards are used by corporations. And then make the next step, which is to show in practice firms that are using both standards.”