| name | sustainability-report |
| description | Write a GRI-Standards sustainability/ESG report — GRI 1 Foundation, GRI 2 General Disclosures, GRI 3 Material Topics (the materiality determination), topic standards across the GRI 200 (economic) / 300 (environmental) / 400 (social) series, and a mandatory GRI content index mapping every disclosure to its location. Use when the deliverable must reproduce the GRI sustainability-reporting structure. Reproduces the GRI structure only, never GRI assurance. Anti-trigger; for a SOC-2-shaped internal controls review use compliance-audit, for a Reg-S-K/Form-10-K annual disclosure use regulatory-disclosure — neither carries the GRI topic-standard frame or the content index this genre requires. |
| argument-hint | <the organization and reporting period to disclose> |
sustainability-report
Produces a GRI-Standards sustainability/ESG report: a disclosure-oriented
document that reports an organization's economic, environmental, and social
impacts against the Global Reporting Initiative's topic standards, ties every
disclosure to a stated materiality determination, and indexes every disclosure
to its location so a reader can audit coverage at a glance. Its center of
gravity is the GRI content index — the report is not conformant without
one mapping every GRI disclosure it makes to where that disclosure lives.
This genre follows the GRI Standards' own reporting architecture (GRI 1/2/3
Universal Standards plus the GRI 200/300/400 Topic Standards). It is a
convention, not a certification: the template reproduces the GRI structure
only. It does not assert assurance, third-party verification, or full "in
accordance with GRI" conformance — that requires meeting every applicable GRI
requirement, which cannot be guaranteed from a findings corpus alone. Present
output as GRI-structured, not GRI-assured.
Pattern (industry: GRI Standards sustainability/ESG report)
- GRI 1 — Foundation — the reporting principles in play and how this
report applies them (accuracy, balance, comparability, verifiability).
- GRI 2 — General Disclosures — the organizational profile, governance
structure, strategy, and stakeholder engagement.
- GRI 3 — Material Topics — the materiality determination: how material
topics were identified and prioritized, not merely listed.
- Topic Standards — disclosures for each material topic, drawn from the
GRI 200 (economic), GRI 300 (environmental), and GRI 400
(social) series, each with quantified performance and a stated reporting
boundary.
- GRI Content Index — the distinguishing back matter: a table mapping
every GRI disclosure made in the report to its location (and any omission,
with a reason).
Add a materiality-matrix figure — a Mermaid quadrantChart, or a plain
material-topic list when a quadrant view isn't warranted — when the
materiality determination supports one. Performance tables per topic standard
are numbered, captioned, and referenced in the text.
Rules that keep it a sustainability report
- Every claim traces to a cited MIF finding
@id and its source URL; no
orphan facts. The GRI content index doubles as the disclosure map — each
indexed disclosure points to the finding(s) behind it.
- State impacts, omissions, and limitations honestly; the genre reproduces
structure, not assurance, and must say so. An undisclosed material impact is
a defect, not an omission of convenience.
- Report verification verdicts explicitly: annotate
weakened or
inconclusive findings rather than silently dropping them; exclude only
falsified findings from the reported facts.
- Hedge uncertain claims and present ranges when sources disagree; state the
reporting boundary (entities, sites, time period covered) for every
quantified disclosure.
- Exhaustive coverage: build the report from the full surviving-findings
corpus — every surviving finding gets its own evidence (claim, citation,
entities), never condensed to a cherry-picked subset. A silently dropped
finding is a defect.
- The GRI Content Index is mandatory back matter, not optional — a report
without it is not conformant with this genre.
- Any figure, chart, or diagram is a fenced
mermaid code block — never ASCII
art, an image link, or Graphviz/DOT. Plain tabular matter stays a Markdown
table. A required figure is never silently omitted — say so in prose when
the data cannot support it.
- Verify the current GRI Standards (Universal and applicable Topic Standards)
live at authoring time; do not bake a specific standard year into the
report as settled fact.
Anti-triggers — do not use this genre for
- An internal controls/process conformance review (auditor's-report
framing, tests-of-controls matrix, management's assertion) — that is
compliance-audit; it never carries the GRI topic-standard frame or a GRI
content index.
- A statutory annual disclosure in Reg S-K / Form 10-K item order
(Business, Risk Factors, MD&A, Financial Statements) — that is
regulatory-disclosure; it is a mandatory public-company filing shape, not
a voluntary ESG/impact narrative organized by GRI topic standards.
- A single already-made decision with no comparison or disclosure structure
to show — that is
adr.
MIF frontmatter
type: semantic — a sustainability report is declarative disclosure knowledge
tied to a reporting period, not a time-bound event or a step sequence. Climb
to L2 with namespace (sustainability-report/<area>), modified, title,
and tags when the drafting context supplies them. Gate every output with
mif-validate at its target level; the floor is --level 1.
Why machine-readable — the point of MIF here
| Question an agent asks | Answered by (frontmatter) |
|---|
| Is this disclosure still current for this reporting period? | temporal.validFrom / ttl |
| Where did the evidence come from; can I trust it? | provenance (W3C-PROV) + citations[] |
| What formalizes it or relates to it (e.g. the audit or the filing it feeds)? | typed relationships[] (relates-to, realized-by) |
| Which disclosures were measured vs. asserted, and under what verdict? | citations[] tied to each topic-standard claim |
The same document still reads as a human sustainability report and projects
losslessly to JSON-LD and back — one artifact, two readers.
The L1 -> L3 climb (two exemplars)
templates/good-l1.md — L1 floor: id, type, created + body. A
complete, valid report, but opaque to a machine consumer.
templates/good.md — L3 (highest this genre supports): adds
namespace, modified, temporal validity, W3C-PROV provenance,
citations[] tied to the topic-standard disclosures, and a typed
relationships[] graph (e.g. relates-to the regulatory disclosure the
data feeds). Validate with mif-validate --level 3.
Author at the highest level the drafting context supports (grade down
rather than fabricate). templates/bad.md shows the antipattern: a report
that makes topic-standard disclosures with no GRI Content Index anywhere to
map them.