How the standards are organised
The GRI Standards are modular. The Universal Standards apply to every reporting organisation: GRI 1 Foundation sets out the reporting principles and requirements for using the standards, GRI 2 General Disclosures covers organisational details, governance and stakeholder engagement, and GRI 3 Material Topics sets out the process for determining material topics and reporting on them. Sector Standards then address issues most relevant to a given sector; GRI has published Sector Standards for oil and gas, coal, and agriculture, aquaculture and fishing, among others, each identifying the topics most likely to be material for organisations in that sector. Topic Standards cover specific subjects such as emissions, waste, occupational health and safety, and employment, and an organisation reports against the topic standards its materiality process identifies as relevant.
Materiality under GRI
GRI's approach to materiality centres on impact: a topic is material if the organisation's activities have, or could have, significant effects on the economy, environment or people, including on human rights. This impact orientation is one of the two lenses that make up double materiality as CSRD and the ESRS define it, alongside the financial materiality lens more closely associated with investor-focused standards. A company reporting under both GRI and the ESRS can generally use much of the same impact assessment work for both, provided the assessment also captures the financial materiality side that GRI alone does not require.
Relationship to CSRD and ESRS
EFRAG referenced the GRI Standards during the development of the ESRS, and GRI and EFRAG have published joint interoperability material mapping disclosures that overlap between the two frameworks. This means a company already reporting under GRI is not starting from nothing when it takes on CSRD obligations, though the ESRS impose requirements, such as the financial materiality lens and mandatory assurance, that GRI reporting alone does not cover. Companies outside CSRD scope, including many outside the EU, often use GRI as a stand-alone framework or alongside the ISSB standards to address both impact-oriented and investor-oriented audiences.
Adopting GRI in a reporting programme
Adopting the GRI Standards starts with the process GRI 3 sets out: understanding the organisation's context, identifying actual and potential impacts through stakeholder engagement, assessing the significance of those impacts, and prioritising the most significant as material topics. The organisation then selects the relevant Topic Standards and any applicable Sector Standard, and discloses against them. GRI permits organisations to state that a report has been prepared "in accordance with" the GRI Standards only where all the applicable requirements have been met, which is a formal claim with its own compliance checklist rather than a general description.
Where GRI fits alongside other standards
Because GRI has no mandatory scope of its own, it is typically the standard a company chooses to use rather than one it is required to use, unless a stock exchange, regulator or member state has referenced it directly. Many organisations layer it under a mandatory regime: a CSRD reporter uses GRI's stakeholder engagement and impact assessment methodology as an input to the double materiality assessment ESRS 1 requires, and a company reporting under IFRS S1 and S2 for investors may still publish a GRI-referenced report for a broader stakeholder audience.