GRI Launches XBRL-Based Digital Taxonomy for Machine-Readable Sustainability Reporting

The Global Reporting Initiative has released its new Sustainability Taxonomy, a machine-readable version of GRI standards based on XBRL that enables companies to submit structured digital sustainability disclosures and improves interoperability with ISSB and European sustainability reporting standards. The taxonomy covers all GRI standards across Universal, Sector and Topic categories.

The new taxonomy allows organisations to share sustainability data in a structured digital format, enabling faster automated data collection, improved comparability of disclosures across companies, and direct digital submission to GRI. According to GRI, the taxonomy has been designed for high alignment with the XBRL-based versions of the ISSB Standards and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards, both of which launched their own XBRL taxonomies in 2024. GRI also stated it collaborated with EFRAG to ensure interoperability with the ESRS underlying the EU's CSRD regulation.

Machine-readable sustainability disclosures are becoming increasingly important as regulators, investors and data aggregators seek to automate the extraction and analysis of corporate ESG data at scale. By moving to XBRL, GRI-based reports can be ingested directly by financial databases, ESG ratings platforms and regulatory data systems, reducing manual data extraction and improving accuracy. For Indian companies that report under both GRI and the BRSR framework, the availability of a digital taxonomy could simplify reporting workflows and improve the consistency of data shared with global investors.

GRI is developing training to support reporting organisations in adopting digital reporting and plans to release filing tools later in 2025 to allow reporters to verify the consistency of their filings with GRI Standards requirements, as well as a set of tools for third-party service providers to ease integration with existing reporting products. The taxonomy release positions GRI to remain relevant in an increasingly digitised and regulated reporting environment, and its alignment with both ISSB and ESRS taxonomies reduces the risk of reporting fragmentation for multinational companies operating across multiple disclosure regimes.

Key figure — 2024 — year ISSB and EFRAG launched their own XBRL taxonomy versions