Scope 5 is certified by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). This was an interesting exercise because it was our first foray out of the very structured world of environmental inventories. When we say environmental inventory here, we’re talking about quantifying an organization’s use of resources and environmental impact (such as carbon emissions and waste generation).
So, what does it mean for Scope 5 to support GRI? For our customers, it means that Scope 5 now enables them to expand beyond environmental metrics and into metrics related to economics, society, human rights, labor practices, and product responsibility as well. Specific examples of such metrics include
- The value of contributions to political parties (G3.1 SO6)
- The number of male and female employees returning after parental leave (G3.1 LA15).
GRI reporting, like many other reporting disciplines, amounts to answering a set of questions (disclosure items in GRI parlance). Some of these are ‘essay’ questions, or qualitative questions, meaning that they require prose answers. Most questions are quantitative questions, requiring numeric responses. Scope 5’s GRI support focuses on the quantitative questions.
To support these, we built a Scope 5 GRI Resource Library. This library is offered in addition to pre-existing libraries (such as our WRI and TCR libraries). Each resource library includes a set of resources.
In Scope 5 terminology, a resource describes an activity (such as the amount of fuel used or the number of minority employees hired), how to convert it to impacts (such as resulting carbon emissions or diversity scores) and how to roll up the corresponding data over time and across an organization. Such rolled-up data supports in-depth analysis leading to new insights.
We found the exercise of compiling our new GRI Resource Library fascinating and we’re proud to now offer a solution for broader sustainability tracking, beyond just the environmental metrics.