Corporate Sustainability: How can GRI guidelines and ISO standards complement each other and relate with the SDGs?
2020 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (One Year)), 10 credits / 15 HE credits
Student thesis
Abstract [en]
This study aims to establish an understanding of corporate sustainability and how companies communicate their sustainability. It also evaluates how sustainability reporting is addressed by various corporate companies by using GRI reporting guidelines and ISO standards, and also how these standards and guidelines are helping the companies to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. A literature review was conducted to understand the various approaches to developing a sustainability report. A theoretical relationship matrix was carried out to establish the relationship of ISO standard (clauses are the section in ISO standard which defines the action or requirements to be carried out, ISO in this research is used to represent the various important areas in a company) with the GRI guidelines (disclosure, are the section used to report contextual information about an organization and its sustainability reporting practices), and a list of the number of SDGs which each GRI disclosure and ISO standard achieves was developed. Four industrial sectors were selected and one company in each sector was used as a case study. The SDG impact assessment web-based tool was used to represent the information provided by the companies in their sustainability report/annual report. From the case studies, it was understood that, out of 4 companies, two companies employed GRI reporting guidelines i.e 2 companies used twin approaches for reporting their sustainability and 2 companies used inside-out reporting approaches. Whereas all the companies had ISO 14001:2015 certification, 3 out of 4 companies had ISO 9001:2015 certification and 2 out of 4 had companies ISO 45001:2018 certified. With this, we can understand a broad picture of corporate sustainability, and in-depth sustainability analysis of one industrial sector from the companies point of view has to be carried out in future.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2020. , p. 41
Keywords [en]
Corporate Sustainability, International Organisation of Standards, Global Reporting Initiative, Sustainable Development, Sustainability framework
National Category
Environmental Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-42549OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hh-42549DiVA, id: diva2:1444478
External cooperation
Kodiak Rating
Subject / course
Environmental Science
Educational program
Master's Programme in Applied Environmental Science
Presentation
2020-06-01, Online, Halmstad, 14:00 (English)
Supervisors
Examiners
2020-06-222020-06-222025-10-01Bibliographically approved