Dear friends, there has recently been an important update in the development of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) by EFRAG. This development has been occurring together with a number of agencies and reporting initiatives, one of most important being the Global Reporting Initiative.

The two organisations have recently published a joint statement of interoperability. In this document, they state outline the current state of similarities and carry over between the existing GRI Standard and the upcoming ESRS.

Many issuers and service providers have previously expressed concern about the potentiality of having to prepare separate reporting approaches in order to satisfy the various reporting standards. In this statement, EFRAG has put those worries to rest by indicating several key points of interoperability between the ESRS and GRI:

The ESRS standard will be utilising the same double materiality approach like GRI currently does, meaning that companies will not have to reassess their impacts and material topics.

Those reporting under ESRS will also be considered as reporting «with reference» to GRI Standards, meaning that issuers will be able to save time and effort by focusing on disclosing the same topics and metrics.

ESRS will allow issuers to use the GRI Standards to report on additional material topics not covered by the ESRS, meaning that issuers will be able to report in accordance with both the ESRS and GRI Standards through one report.

In the near future, EFRAG and GRI will establish and make publicly available the list of disclosures and data points which correlate between the two standards. Once this document is published, issuers and service providers should be able to see the similarities between the standards and start preparing for these new requirements.

We are very glad that many of the fears within the corporate reporting industry have been addressed, namely those regarding the confusion between the numerous existing reporting standards. EFRAG’s focus to developing the ESRS with a high degree of commonality to the GRI Standard is a great vote of confidence towards a universal reporting standard.

We are similarly positive about the fact that most of our partners will be well prepared for these new standards, considering the prevalence of the GRI Standard in our collective reporting.

More information on this can be found at EFRAG’s press release.

Global Reporting News article on the topic, with valuable quotes from key EFRAG members.

Latest update in EFRAG reporting standard development