Background

The Sustainability Report is the primary medium for presenting an organization’s environmental achievements and impacts. It differs from the annual report, which is an accounting document that provides a representation of a company’s financial position, because it aims to inform stakeholders of the economic, social and environmental results generated by the company in carrying out its activities.

Technically speaking, the Sustainability Report aims to establish standards, facilitate dialogue, and hold organizations accountable to internal and external stakeholders with respect to the organization’s performance toward sustainable development goals.

Since companies around the world began reporting their sustainability performance, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has been the most widely adopted and used reporting framework, ensuring reliability and completeness of information.

The GRI has developed and elaborated the GRI Standards, consisting of a set of universal standards for the disclosure of general information about Society and specific standards for the reporting of material issues in the economic, environmental and social spheres.

Current regulatory developments demonstrate the importance of making a commitment to prepare and disclose a Sustainability Report. Currently, in the for-profit sphere, the disclosure non-financial information (NFRD – Non-Financial Reporting Directive of 2014) is mandatory for listed companies and the banking-insurance sector, large companies, while it is voluntary for the remaining group of companies.

However, on January 5, 2023, the CSRD – Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive – came into effect, which modernizes and strengthens the standards for social and environmental information that companies must report. A wider range of large companies, as well as listed SMEs, will now be required to report on sustainability. It has been estimated that this will increase from about 11,000 companies currently subject to NFRD to potentially about 49,000 companies subject to CSRD. The first companies will have to apply the new rules for the first time in fiscal year 2024, for reports published in 2025, and in addition, companies subject to CSRD will have to report in accordance with the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) developed by the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG).

The role of Greenwich

Greenwich, with GRI Certified Sustainability Professional staff, provides support to its clients in the process of preparing the Sustainability Report, through a series of consolidated steps that allow the Company, and its Stakeholders, to understand its meaning, objective and results.

Specifically, Greenwich is able to:

• Preliminarily assess the level of corporate sustainability in terms of mission, principles, values and initiatives already in place;
• Perform benchmarking analysis against industry best practices in sustainability reporting;
• Support the Company in identifying and engaging its internal and external stakeholders;
• Conduct a materiality analysis aimed at building the company’s materiality matrix;
• Identify KPIs useful for materiality reporting; Develop the Sustainability Report by applying GRI Standards and other major international guidelines.

Benefits for clients

• Streamlining processes and improving efficiency;
• Comparison and evaluation of sustainability performance against laws, regulations, codes, performance standards and voluntary initiatives;
• Better understanding of risks and opportunities;
• Improved long-term management strategy and policy;
• Mitigation of adverse environmental, social and governance-related consequences;
• Improved reputation and brand loyalty;
• Improved ability to demonstrate how the organization influences and is influenced by expectations for sustainable development.