Do you Report Sustainability Aspects of Your Project? – Part 1 of 2

In this episode, Ricardo talks about the "Global Reporting Initiative", an association that develops standards that help organizations of various sectors to identify and report what they do to build a more sustainable world, which goes beyond the environmental aspect.

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Episode transcript

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes BM Podcast Today. I like to start a series of, to Podcast to cover something that is probably more the most of you have never heard the bottle it's about the Global Reporting Initiative or GRI Global Reporting Initiative is an independent organization that was created in the late nineties that joins government business, civil society, and academia address the concept of Sustainability.

And when it's almost always, when I talk about Sustainability people directly related it to environment, it's true, but we need to open up a lot. And when I talk Sustainability I'm talking about environmental, social and economical Sustainability and this tree main categories, they are the key pillar of the GRI and the GRI.

If we go back to the cranium, our Reporting the GRI trikes to create a set of standers, a set of guidelines that every single organization should use to Report Sustainability. And this will create some, feel like a new uniform boarding system where organizations can compare themselves to other organizations to address and understand Sustainability. You may ask me, Ricardo why you were talking about all of that.

If this podcast is mainly concerned about project management, it's because most of the organizations, if not all of them, they drive change through projects, So projects, they face me and your challenges on their Sustainability in terms of environmental, social, and economical sustainability. So this is what and why it's so important to understand what is the impact of our project in the jail and results of the organization.

We work in with Eve, we go a little bit deeper on the GRI. They have a set of guidelines and the guidelines are basically, and three documents that you can [email protected]. You can download them for free. And the first one it's called Reporting principle, both, and the standard disclosures. So this is a very simple in a straightforward guide. Same if you want to talk and Report and Sustainability which kind of principles should you keep in mind, which kind of disclosures should you use, which kind of items should you talk about?

The second is about the implementation it's of course its not easy to implement these kind of standard, so we need to move forward on that. And the third one is the F Q a with basic answers on some of the most common questions. So you need just understand that probably more than 90% of the top 500 companies use your right almost 10,000 organizations, more than 23,000 reports.

So I'm talking about very relevant numbers on the GRI reporting. And basically if you go into one, try to understand the scope of GRI, they divide the main Sustainability concept into the three categories, environmental, social, and economical. And then if you go with a little bit further, each of these categories, it's a split it into Aspects basically 45, six Aspects.

This Aspects are something that are, is specific. For example, waist management, for example, energy consumption, for example, gender on the social aspect. And then you go a little bit down and we have the indicators. Indicators are basically big key index. You use to report on that Aspects so one aspect has at least one indicator. So let's suppose that you have an aspect about gender.

Then you have an indicator, for example, percent of the male working in the project or working in that organization. This is a way that we measure it's very, very important. And then we understand that GRI does not require a target. GRI does not say that, Oh, for a male participation should be 50% or 55% each company to decide what will be their target. But what did he arrive does is it to make sure that all organizations, they Report in a similar fashion the way, and this is what makes a big difference.

So if you go to the principles of this, Reporting regarding content, you say, you must include stakeholder. So it's not a Reporting on what you want to report, but what is your stake holders we want you to report on? So if you are building a nuclear power plant, okay, it's very important to understand which kind of stakeholder should I bring to the table. And then for this one, a second one is the sustainability context.

What is the context you were working with? Let's suppose that your project is an office project or your company has a very low footprint, but the major social impact, and this will drive us to the materiality means you need to report on what really mattered to that stakeholder group. So you don't need to report on everything in the last but not least. And you need to understand that the Report, she should be a complete shoot, cover everything.

So this for our, the principles of the content. But if you go a little bit further and he says, what, which are the principles of quality, the first thing, cause that you do a report on it. Oh really? The things you want to showcase men's that you were happy. So that right, this is a balance. So you should, Report also the thinks that you plan to add, of course, in the future second. And for me, one of the most important its what we call comparability. So all reports, they use the same standards.

So you can compare Your Project or your organization to different ones. So you can understand the benchmarks on that accuracy. So you need to have information that is sharp, that people can understand the logic behind and this will grieve reliability. So it's something that is sharp and reliable. And then the two last spring's posts are clarity and timeline.

This bins, there is a chronology I want to know. Okay. You were talking about when you were talking, we can about the last month or last year. So all of this Aspects will be it on the Sustainability Aspects next week. What I plan to do each to go a little bit deeper on the Project side and give you some of that Aspects and how will you can work on that, but this will be next week with the second part of this GRI Reporting Podcast see you next week.

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