SMEs and GRI

It can be intimidating for a small or medium-sized enterprise to tackle carbon accounting let alone reporting. GRI is one among many reporting frameworks that allow organizations to account for progress against a wide array of KPIs. The link below is GRI's scaled down reporting for SMEs and a guide to how to go through that process. The other link is to a conference paper from Italy looking at how to scale down GRI KPIs to just those that are most immediately useful and for which an SME in the agricultural sector (their sector of choice in their research) could usefully and realistically collect and report data.  Together, these links and the information they provide can give a small or medium sized enterprise some idea of a direction.

The useful aspect of the Italian team's conference paper is that they present the possibility of using GRI's KPIs as something of a starting menu and choosing only those indicators that are both useful and against which data can easily be collected.  This offers a smaller business a way of looking at these as something that is relevant to their smaller-scale operations as well.  Whatever the size of a business, it remains true that having a baseline idea of what the company is using in terms of energy and water at a minimum and what it is generating in terms of GHG emissions and waste is a necessity to understand and convey both current impacts and sustainability gains made from then on.  You can't manage what you don't measure, as they say.  In addition, finding ways to move from that baseline to reduce energy, water, and material (e.g. plastic packaging) use will help any company's bottom line. Economic arguments are always a solid underpinning to talking about sustainability data collection and reporting and why it matters. 

 A set of KPIs for sustainability of SMEs in agribusiness sector.pdf

 Ready To Report? Introducing Sustainability Reporting For Smes Sustainability Strategic Managem.pdf