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)

1. GRI 1 — Foundation — the reporting principles in play and how this report applies them (accuracy, balance, comparability, verifiability).
2. GRI 2 — General Disclosures — the organizational profile, governance structure, strategy, and stakeholder engagement.
3. GRI 3 — Material Topics — the materiality determination: how material topics were identified and prioritized, not merely listed.
4. 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.
5. 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

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.