GRI 1 Requirement 9: how to notify GRI that you used the Standards

If your client publishes a sustainability report in accordance with the GRI Standards, there is a step at the end that takes five minutes and is quietly missed by a lot of Indian reporters: notifying GRI that the Standards were used. It is not a formality of the optional kind. It is Requirement 9 of GRI 1: Foundation 2021, one of the nine requirements an organisation must meet to report in accordance with the Standards.

What Requirement 9 says

GRI 1: Foundation 2021 sets out nine requirements for reporting in accordance with the GRI Standards. Eight of them concern how you report: applying the reporting principles, determining material topics, providing the disclosures, publishing a GRI content index, providing a statement of use, and so on. The ninth concerns telling GRI you have done it.

The obligation is to notify GRI of the use of the GRI Standards, and it is discharged by sending an email. An organisation that satisfies the other eight requirements but skips this one has not fully met the in-accordance conditions, which matters because the statement of use in the report asserts that it has.

Exactly what to send

Email reportregistration@globalreporting.org with:

• The legal name of the organisation, as it appears in the report.
• The statement of use, the sentence in the report declaring the reporting period and whether the report is in accordance with, or with reference to, the GRI Standards.
• A link to the GRI content index.
• A link to the report, where it is published as a standalone document.
• A contact person at the organisation, with their contact details.

There is no template to complete and no portal to log into. A plain email carrying those five things is the whole of it.

When to do it

After the report is published, since the notification carries links to the published content index and report. Make it the last item on the publication checklist, alongside uploading the report and updating the website, rather than something you intend to get to later. In practice, “later” is when it gets lost.

If the organisation publishes annually, this recurs annually. Each report requires its own notification.

In accordance with, or with reference to

Worth settling before you draft the statement of use, because reporters get this wrong in both directions. In accordance with means the organisation has met all nine requirements of GRI 1 and reported all disclosures for its material topics. With reference to is the lighter option, used where an organisation applies selected GRI Standards without meeting the full set of requirements. The statement of use must say which, accurately, and it is one of the first things a reader who knows GRI will check.

How this relates to BRSR

It does not, directly, and that is worth being clear about because the two get conflated. BRSR is SEBI's mandatory format, filed inside the annual report under LODR Regulation 34(2)(f). It has no notification step and no relationship with GRI.

The two meet only in practice: many Indian listed companies publish a GRI-referenced sustainability report alongside the annual report containing the BRSR. That GRI report is what triggers Requirement 9. If your client publishes both, the notification concerns the GRI report only.

The underlying data does overlap heavily, which is the useful part. Most BRSR disclosures map onto a GRI Standard, so a company collecting once can report to both. Our cross-framework mapping tool sets out the crosswalk and exports it, and BRSR vs GRI covers where the two frameworks genuinely differ.