ISO 26000, the key to making sustainability accessible?

The world's first universally-applicable sustainability standard is entering the final stretch. ISO 26000, ISO's first “soft,” ie. non-technical standard will be finalized and put to a vote in Copenhagen this May 17-21st. Let's hope the Danish capital is a luckier location for ISO than it was for international climate negotiations...

As Paul Hohnen, co-founder of the Global Reporting Initiative writes in this recent post on the Ethical Corporation website, the crucial vote may not pass. Concerns over content, cost and certification could lead some countries to vote against the new standard. For a analysis of these issues, click here.

As a user and proponent of the GRI guidelines, I would nevertheless welcome a standard designed to be more flexible. From the outset, ISO 2600 was meant to help all organizations – big and small, businesses, NGO's etc. - integrate sustainability into the every-day working practices. For more than 10 years, the GRI has helped companies measure, improve and communicate their impacts on people, the environment and the economy, but it has come under criticism for being too long, too restrictive and too expensive to be useful for smaller companies.

At sustainable.Agency, we've worked hard to adapt the GRI into a series of tools to help SME's measure impacts, set reductions goals and communicate in ways that will make their stakeholders stand up and take notice. And yet, our client's need for reports that are easy to use and read (five pages or less) has required tweaking the guidelines to the extent that we qualify them as “GRI inspired.” ISO 26000 could therefore be invaluable in spreading sustainability and transparency to groups that haven't yet been engaged by the green shift.

At a conference in Montreal last February on responsible purchasing, Denis Pronovost, a member of the Canadian delegation working on ISO 26000 said that far from competing with the GRI guidelines, ISO aims to complement it by setting out broad-based goals for implementing sustainability within organizations. He also expressed reservations concerning its length, saying that the Canadian delegation would likely oppose a document more than 100 pages-long. Any bigger, he said, would be an obstacle for smaller organizations with limited time and resources. “We want as many organizations as possible to use the standard, and they won't if it's too long.”

Any developments will be posted on this blog when they become available.