Stakeholders—including investors, companies, regulators, communities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—rely on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) or sustainability 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 sustainability reporting.
Note: Frameworks provide principles-based guidance on how to structure information about disclosures, while standards help make frameworks actionable by providing specific, detailed requirements for those disclosures.
From Sustainability Explorer , you can browse content from multiple frameworks and standards to identify the disclosures that matter—or are material—for sustainability 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 Sustainability reporting role can use Sustainability Explorer.
Tip: To view only disclosures relevant to your sustainability reporting, you can specify your organization's frameworks and industries from the Properties panel.
Browse and search frameworks
To identify material disclosures to your organization's sustainability reporting, browse and search frameworks and standards in Sustainability 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 the disclosures and reporting requirements of a specific framework or standard.
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To find a specific framework's content, click
Filters,
then search
for or select its framework, or choose to view only versions
with
a specific status.
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To explore a framework's content, click
the
framework or the applicable version of its content.
Tip: To find specific content within a framework, click Search, and search for it by standard or keyword. You can also select to Expand all or Collapse all content in the outline.
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 Sustainability 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 Explore panel. For example, you can view one disclosure's details in the main pane, while you also view a Related disclosure in the Explore panel.
- To focus on a detail in the main pane, click its name.
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To view a detail side-by-side with other content, click Preview .
Tip: To open the content from the Explore panel in the main pane, click Open in Explorer.
View related content
To help identify disclosures you may be interested in, Sustainability Explorer lists content that may be related, based on industry guidance or sustainability factor.
From Related, you can review this content, such as determine whether it applies to your reporting needs. To view the related content in the Explore panel, click its name.
Tip: To open the content from the Explore panel in the main pane, click Open in Explorer.
Download original source content
To enable deeper review of content outside of Workiva, you can save a ZIP file of portable document files (PDFs) for:
- Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards
- European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS)
- International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Sustainability Disclosure Standards
- Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards (ASRS)
The downloaded PDFs include the original source content from the publisher, including any images, introductory front matter, formulas, and tables.
Note: The downloaded PDFs do not include any comments, related disclosures, or other context added in Sustainability Explorer.
- In Sustainability Explorer, browse to the content to download.
- Click Download original source files .
- Click Download.
Copy Explorer ID for Program Import
From Sustainability Program, you can use Import to align multiple metrics — in bulk — to their related content in Sustainability Explorer. To identify which content to align with metrics, Import uses unique Explorer IDs.
To enter an Explorer ID in an import template:
- In Sustainability Explorer, browse to the content to align with a metric.
- From the content's menu, select Copy Explorer ID, then select its ID.
- In the import template, select the Metric content and tags sheet.
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In the metric's row, paste the ID in the column for the content's framework.
Note: To add multiple Explorer IDs for the same framework, enter them as a comma-separated list. If an ID contains a comma (
,), enter a double quotation mark (") at the beginning and end, such as"S2 Basis for Conclusions on IFRS S2 Climate-related Disclosures Core content Metrics and targets Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions BC79_2024-05-01".
To learn more, view Complete import template for Sustainability Program.