The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) introduced the ‘Materiality Matters’ check for Reports based on the G4 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines.
G4 has an increased emphasis on the need for organizations to focus – in the reporting process and final report – on those topics that are material to their business and their key stakeholders. This ‘materiality’ focus will make reports more relevant and more credible. This will, in turn, enable organizations to better inform markets and society on sustainability matters. The focus on materiality means that G4-based sustainability reports will focus on matters that are really critical to achieving the organization’s goals and managing its impacts on society.
To further this main concept of G4, GRI has designed the ‘Materiality Matters’ check.
The Objectives of the ‘Materiality Matters’ check are:
- To open a dialogue with reporters before reports are published
- To bring clarity on the location of critical content that readers can expect to find in the report
- To focus on the main features of G4-based reports: the definition of material Aspects (or other material topics), their boundaries, and information on stakeholder engagement
The ‘Materiality Matters’ check focuses exclusively on the General Standard Disclosures G4-17 to G4-27 from the GRI G4 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines and verifies that at the time of publication of the report, the locations of these disclosures were easy to find in both the Content Index and in the text of the final report.
Verifying the quality of the reported information and the process of preparing the disclosures is beyond the scope of this service.
