GRI Releases New Linkage Document for G4 / CDP WATER

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Louis Coppola

#Corporate Sustainability #G4 #Sustainability Big Data 

By Louis Coppola @ G&A – Part of the Sustainability Big Data Series

GRI has just released the latest of its “linkage documents”.
This one is the first to link the CDP Water questions to the GRI G4 indicators.
The goal of these linkage documents is to reduce “survey fatigue” and to allow companies to translate their disclosures between multiple important third party disclosure standards and data requests.  Linking these disclosures through a comprehensive reporting index can also add value for the readers of reports which can look at data through the lens of their choice and quickly identify the most important and relevant information.
Both organizations continue to cooperate on aligning best practice, thus avoiding duplication of disclosure efforts, and easing the reporting burden for the thousands of companies that use CDP’s water program and GRI’s Sustainability Reporting Guidelines. This alignment allows organizations to use the same data points in both reporting channels. The information provided through either channel can form part of a sustainability report using the GRI Guidelines and/or to answer parts of CDP’s questionnaires.

“Driven by our ongoing commitment to advance a common approach to water disclosure and streamline global reporting, we worked together with CDP to create this linkage guidance”, says Bastian Buck, Director Reporting Standard at GRI. “Thousands of reporting organizations will derive benefit from it, ultimately ensuring corporate reporting is indeed more efficient, effective, and valuable to a wide array of information users around the world.”
“Water is becoming a strategic concern for many businesses and consequently we are seeing an increase in corporate water disclosure”, says Pedro Faria, Technical Director at CDP. “The alignment between GRI and CDP on water linkages will facilitate more efficient corporate reporting. It will also improve the consistency and comparability of data, enabling multiple stakeholders to better understand how business

Linking GRI and CDP: Water (2015) can be downloaded for free in the GRI Resource Library
Linking GRI and CDP: Climate Change (2015) can also be downloaded for free here.