By Rajesh Chhabara, Managing Director, CSRWorks International
It is becoming fashionable to think so.
ISSB is ascendant. ESRS has redrawn the reporting map in Europe. The conversation has shifted. And in some circles, GRI is now spoken about as though it belongs to an earlier chapter of sustainability reporting rather than the current one.
I do not agree.
Yes, the reporting landscape has changed significantly. Yes, ISSB is becoming increasingly important as the global baseline for investor-focused sustainability disclosure, and yes, ESRS has changed the reporting conversation in Europe. But it is far too simplistic to conclude from this that GRI is fading into irrelevance. In my view, that conclusion reflects a narrow reading of what sustainability reporting is for, and an equally narrow reading of what GRI is designed to do.
The problem starts with the lens.
If sustainability reporting is treated mainly as an exercise in investor communication or regulatory compliance, then it becomes easy to assume that newer frameworks have naturally pushed GRI to the margins. But that is exactly where the analysis begins to weaken. GRI was never designed simply to tell investors what sustainability issues might affect enterprise value. Its role has always been broader. It is built to help organisations understand and report their impacts on the economy, environment and people. That remains a distinct and essential function. GRI continues to define its standards in exactly those terms.
And that distinction still matters.
A company’s impacts on workers, communities, ecosystems, supply chains and wider society do not somehow become less important because investor-focused disclosure has become more sophisticated. If anything, in a world of rising scrutiny and higher expectations around corporate accountability, credible impact reporting becomes more important, not less. One of the weaknesses in the current debate is that it sometimes treats impact reporting as though it were somehow secondary to financially oriented disclosure. I have never found that a convincing distinction. Severe environmental or social impacts often become financially material over time, and sometimes very quickly, through regulation, litigation, operational disruption, reputational damage, customer pressure or loss of market access. The IFRS Foundation’s collaboration with GRI itself reflects the fact that these systems are meant to work together rather than sit in separate worlds.
This is one reason I remain unconvinced by the increasingly common “GRI versus ISSB” or “GRI versus ESRS” framing.
It is tidy, and perhaps comforting, to turn the discussion into a contest. But it is also increasingly detached from reality. The more useful question is not which framework wins. It is what each framework is designed to do, and what they can do together.
On that question, the direction of travel is already clear. EFRAG and GRI have stated that a high degree of interoperability has been achieved between ESRS and GRI Standards, with the explicit aim of reducing double reporting and unnecessary complexity. GRI and the IFRS Foundation have also deepened collaboration to enable fuller interoperability between GRI and ISSB Standards. In other words, the institutions shaping the reporting landscape are not behaving as though these frameworks must crowd one another out. They are moving, deliberately, towards coexistence and interoperability.
That point matters particularly in Europe, where one sometimes hears that ESRS has made GRI irrelevant.
I think that view gets the relationship exactly backwards.
Companies with solid GRI reporting experience are often better prepared for ESRS than they realise. Good GRI reporting builds habits that matter: thinking seriously about material topics, engaging stakeholders properly, articulating governance clearly, disclosing actions and targets, and reporting impacts with discipline. Those are not small things. They are part of what strong reporting capability looks like. GRI has itself argued that reporting under its standards helps prepare companies for the EU framework, and the interoperability work with EFRAG was designed precisely to make that relationship less duplicative and more coherent. For many organisations, GRI is not a detour from ESRS readiness. It can be part of the foundation.
There is another reason I think writing off GRI is a mistake.
The more crowded and complex the reporting landscape becomes, the more important usability becomes. This point is often underestimated. People understandably focus on ambition, architecture, legal scope and conceptual sophistication. But a reporting framework is not judged only by what it asks for in theory. It is also judged by whether organisations can actually use it well.
GRI’s practicality is one of its quiet strengths. Its architecture of Universal Standards, Sector Standards and Topic Standards gives organisations a usable structure for organising reporting, building internal processes and improving over time. That usability should not be mistaken for simplicity in the pejorative sense. It is a strategic strength. It is one reason organisations are able to start reporting properly, build maturity and position themselves to work more effectively with newer standards and requirements. In a more complex reporting environment, practicality is not separate from relevance. It is part of relevance.
This matters because one of the real risks in the current moment is that sustainability reporting becomes more elaborate without becoming more meaningful.
We are already seeing reports that are technically competent, carefully structured and full of the right language, yet still leave the reader with little real understanding of the company’s impacts, choices or accountability. That is a serious problem. A sustainability report should not merely satisfy a requirement. It should provide a fair and meaningful account of what matters. One of GRI’s enduring strengths is that it resists a thin, formulaic version of reporting. When used properly, it pushes organisations to explain their impacts, management approach, actions and performance in a fuller and more intelligible way. Not always shorter. Not always easier. But often more meaningful.
And then there is the claim behind the headline itself: that GRI is fading.
That, too, seems overstated.
A fading framework would not be deepening interoperability work with EFRAG and the IFRS Foundation. A fading framework would not be publishing mapping tools, joint guidance and implementation resources to help organisations navigate a more connected reporting landscape. And a fading framework would not still be presented by GRI as widely used across major regions. Whatever one’s preferred framework mix may be, the available evidence does not support the idea that GRI has simply slipped into obsolescence. It suggests something more important: that GRI is adapting to a changed market while continuing to occupy a role that other standards do not fully replace.
So is GRI fading?
I do not think so.
What may be fading is the old assumption that one framework alone can define the whole sustainability reporting conversation. The landscape has become more plural, more demanding and more interconnected. In that landscape, GRI still matters because impact reporting still matters, broader stakeholder accountability still matters, and practical reporting systems that organisations can actually use well still matter.
The more mature response, in my view, is not to ask whether GRI has been overtaken. It is to ask where GRI still adds value, and how organisations can use it intelligently alongside ESRS and ISSB.
That is the more demanding question.
It is also the more useful one.
