Organizations and experts are invited to test a new format for reports based on the GRI Guidelines, as GRI releases its draft XBRL Taxonomy for public comment. The resulting ‘exposure draft’ will be available for public comment until 23 January 2012. Find the taxonomy and related documents here.

Produced in a joint project with Deloitte, the new GRI XBRL Taxonomy for providing sustainability data will help investors, auditors and analysts to access information in sustainability reports faster, and more simply.

Rina Levy, Senior ESG Analyst at Bloomberg and member of the Taxonomy Review Team, said: “This is a really exciting time for sustainability reporting – the new taxonomy will really open up the information in reports and help investors and analysts find the data they need much more quickly and easily.”

GRI and Deloitte have produced an XBRL taxonomy covering both the G3 Guidelines and GRI's latest G3.1 Guidelines. The GRI Taxonomy has already been reviewed by an expert team. 

According to Inés García-Pintos, Head of CSR and innovation at CECA and member of the Taxonomy Review Team, public feedback is vital. “This XBRL taxonomy is for everyone, so we need to make sure it is as suitable and as high quality as possible. We urge organizations that report using the GRI Guidelines to help us achieve this by testing out the taxonomy and giving feedback to GRI.”

During the comment period, participants can review the Taxonomy and related documentation, see how the taxonomy is applied, and test the taxonomy by applying it to their reports. Feedback on these aspects will help GRI improve the taxonomy.

“The new GRI Taxonomy will enable organizations to tag their sustainability data in reports,” said Cees de Boer, CFO at Deloitte Netherlands and board member at XBRL International.

“The GRI Taxonomy will help organizations improve the quality and integrity of their sustainability performance data. This will help investors, auditors and other report users to access and compare GRI data more quickly and easily without the need for excessive manual work.”

Pedro Faria, Technical Director at Carbon Disclosure Project and member of the Taxonomy Review Team, added: “XBRL will have an important role to play in increasing accessibility to climate change and sustainability data in a user friendly, globally recognized format. Critical to the success of this project is ensuring that key stakeholders are closely involved in testing the taxonomies as they develop. I would like to invite all organizations to test and use the new GRI taxonomy as an essential contribution for its development.”

For more information about the XBRL taxonomy project, please see