Interview Series: Bastian Buck

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This week’s read time: 5 minutes

Welcome to the Green Digest Interview Series, our bi-weekly feature showcasing conversations with the industry’s leading voices - CSOs, sustainability directors, and other senior professionals shaping the sustainability landscape. Each edition dives into their professional journeys, hands-on insights, and outlook on the challenges and opportunities defining corporate sustainability.

These interviews are designed to be quick, insightful reads, offering you actionable takeaways and a personal glimpse into the people leading the way. Stay tuned for stories, strategies, and lessons that matter to you.

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PROFILE

This week’s guest:

Bastian Buck

Chief Standards Officer at the GRI

Bastian Buck is Chief Standards Officer for the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), a position he has held for over a decade. Bastian also serves as a member of the GRI Management Board.

GRI is the creator of the common global language to assess and report environmental, social and economic impacts, as articulated though the GRI Standards – the world’s most widely used sustainability reporting standards.

Bastian leads the GRI Standards Team, and is responsible for the ongoing development, implementation and enhancement of the Standards, and collaboration with other global and regional standard setters and disclosure frameworks.

Bastian has been with GRI since 2006 and has undertaken a wide range of roles related to capacity building and standard setting. This including managing the evolution of the previous GRI Guidelines – and leading the transition to standard-setting in 2016, with the launch of the GRI Standards.

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To start, can you tell us where GRI is focusing its efforts right now? What are your main priorities and initiatives on your agenda?

At the heart of GRI’s mission is to empower organizations of all sizes to build sustainable, long-term value – benefiting people and planet. Central to this is the GRI Standards, which set the global best practice for companies to disclose their impacts, delivering crucial data for businesses and information users, including investors.

This year we have enhanced the GRI Standards system through the launch of two revised Standards – for Climate Change (GRI 102) and Energy (GRI 103). These Standards empower organizations to be transparent on and accelerate action toward a just transition.

Alongside our Standards, we provide tools, training, services and events to help individuals and organizations unlock the value of reporting. This includes online learning through the GRI Academy, and networking and engagement opportunities through the GRI Community.

We improve the GRI Standards continuously. In 2025, we are consulting on revised labor and economic impact standards, and have four new sector standards under development - covering banking, insurance, capital markets as well as textiles and apparel.

We recognize that we do not exist in isolation, and are closely working with partner organizations to achieve a streamlined global system for sustainability reporting. Importantly, this includes our ongoing collaboration with the colleagues from the ISSB on the global level as well as, for example, EFRAG in the EU context.

Looking ahead, with ESRS setting the baseline for sustainability reporting in the EU and ISSB gaining adoption in multiple jurisdictions, what do you see as GRI’s role over the next 5-10 years?

The GRI Standards provide the global benchmark for organizations to report on their impacts. That includes most major companies worldwide, with KPMG research from last year finding 77% of top 250 global companies report with GRI. This is very encouraging and we see strong complementarity with the direction of travel in Europe, and with the ISSB at the global level.

The GRI Standards have become the blueprint for impact focused sustainability reporting and regulators build on GRI’s work.

The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) were co-created with GRI, meaning our standards are highly aligned. While we await the outcome of the EU Omnibus process, it’s encouraging that double materiality disclosure is being safeguarded and we will continue to work to achieve the highest possible alignment in the revised version of the ESRS. On the impact reporting side, GRI will have a key role to play, in Europe and beyond, in the coming years.

Through our MoU with the IFRS Foundation, we are collaborating to deliver a seamless, global and comprehensive sustainability reporting system. Central to this ongoing work is to optimize how GRI and ISSB Standards can be used together – to facilitate reporting on an organization’s impacts, risks and opportunities.

GRI puts strong emphasis on impact materiality. Why do you think this approach is important, and what difference can it make for companies in practice?

Transparency for the impacts organizations have on the environment, economy and society is fundamental to understanding their contribution toward sustainable development. Going through an impact-focused materiality exercise, as it is set out in our GRI 3 Standard, enables organizations to understand and prioritize their most significant impacts on others. Organizations that have gone through this approach develop a much more holistic understanding of their business model – that’s a tremendous strategic and competitive advantage. In turn, this understanding of impacts is a critical input toward the analysis of risks and opportunities of the organization. Many risks and opportunities can only be evaluated with an in-depth understanding of the related impacts.

What’s the toughest debate you’ve had to navigate in standard setting, either politically, technically, or philosophically?

One of the most fundamental challenges in advancing the mission of GRI has been to argue the case for the value of impact focused disclosure.

Gaining recognition for the perspective promoted by GRI for more than 25 years has been a long game and difficult at times. Too often, the lens applied to corporate reporting is focused on financial impact in the short-term, and this is what we encounter when we promote the perspective of adding impact disclosure to the corporate reporting regime.

At GRI, we have been at the forefront of establishing the importance of impact information in its own right, which inevitability brings up discussions of time horizon, accountability and responsibility. Exploring what the impact of an organization’s activities are on others goes deep into questioning established business models and practices. These can be uncomfortable discussions.

Establishing which topics are likely material from an impact perspective, for each sector and for each of the 30 plus sustainability topics covered in the GRI Standards, is at the heart of GRI’s standard setting efforts. It is also crucial to ensuring organizations and their stakeholders are able to understand, measure and manage these topics.

Having been with GRI for almost 20 years, what’s the most significant change you’ve seen in the sustainability reporting landscape?

The most significant change happened in recent years when regulators around the globe started to look into augmenting existing corporate reporting regulations.

This development was certainly triggered by the ambitious agenda set out in Europe. Many jurisdictions have come to the conclusion that transparency expectations focused on the impacts of corporate activities is a key tool in accomplishing wider policy objectives fostering international capital market access, social cohesion and sustainable development. Despite the more recent setbacks, this development is here to stay and will change the corporate reporting paradigm fundamentally.

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