Stakeholders—including investors, companies, regulators, communities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—rely on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting to make informed decisions. To help meet this need, several organizations developed frameworks and standards that work together to ease comparable, consistent, and reliable disclosures in ESG reporting.
Note: Frameworks provide principles-based guidance on how to structure information about ESG disclosures, while standards help make frameworks actionable by providing specific, detailed requirements for those disclosures.
From ESG Explorer , you can browse multiple frameworks and standards to identify the disclosures that matter—or are material—for ESG reporting in one location. No need to track down each framework's disclosures or juggle multiple PDFs and websites!
Note: Only workspace members with the ESG role can use ESG Explorer.
Tip: To view only disclosures relevant to your ESG reporting, you can specify your organization's frameworks and industries from the ESG Admin panel.
Browse and search frameworks
To identify material disclosures to your organization's ESG reporting, browse and search frameworks and standards in ESG Explorer.
Tip: To help identify material disclosures for your sector or industry, start with the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) Materiality Finder or Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) materiality map.
From the Frameworks panel, you can browse disclosures and their reporting requirements—or metrics—of a specific framework or standard:
- Click a framework or standard to browse its disclosures and metrics in the main pane.
- Expand to browse its disclosures and metrics in the panel, with their details in the main pane:
- To browse all disclosures and metrics together, click Show outline view .
Tip: To quickly view or hide disclosures' metrics in the outline, click Expand all or Collapse all , respectively. To step back through the browse history, click Back .
- To browse by the top-level standards or recommendations, click Show navigator view .
Tip: To step back through the browse history, click Back , or select the level of the disclosure to return to.
- To browse all disclosures and metrics together, click Show outline view .
To browse all frameworks and standards, search by keyword—such as Water, Gender, or Climate—to view their relevant disclosures in the main pane.
Tip: As you identify material disclosures and metrics, click Bookmark to create a curated list for everyone in your workspace. From ESG Explorer, you can reference bookmarks pinned on Home or from the Bookmarks panel.
View a disclosure's details
When you select a disclosure, you can view its details — such as its description, reporting requirements, and related disclosures from other frameworks and standards — in either the main pane or the Preview panel.
- To focus on a detail in the main pane, click its name.
- To view a detail side-by-side with other content, click Preview .
Tip: From the Preview panel, you can select where to view the full details. To expand the details in the panel itself, click Focus panel. To open the details in the main pane, click Focus main.
Download original source content of GRI Standards
To enable deeper review of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards outside of Workiva, you can save a ZIP file of the portable document files (PDFs) published by GRI. The downloaded PDFs include the original source content from GRI, including any images and introductory front matter.
Note: The downloaded PDFs do not include any comments, related disclosures, or other context added in ESG Explorer.
- In ESG Explorer, browse to the GRI Standards.
Tip: To download another version of the Standards, select the version from the ESG Admin panel.
- Click Download original source file .
- Click Download.