Building a proactive and sustainable world, together

Positive change does not come through wishful thinking. Our busy and complicated world will continually face many challenges on many fronts. Beyond climate change, other main challenges we need to deal with include: other aspects of planetary pollution and destruction (eg. waste, plastics), Biodiversity loss (which also affects food security), human rights, inequality (digital and economic), mental health deterioration, and social cohesion erosion. 

Our aim: Mobilising 235 million university students to start understanding significant impacts and take action in their future professions

Arguably, universities and other teaching institutions’ most important impact concerns teaching students the skills they need to conduct their future professions in a sustainable and responsible way. Only after proper and principled significant impact identification (on economy, society, people), can the other sustainability steps begin to be implemented (measure, manage and change). Preparing students to take real action to continually address significant impacts where these matter. 

The goal of this petition 

To achieve the above aim our goal is to convince the GRI Global Sustainability Standards Board (GSSB) to work on the Education services sector standard as a top priority in the work programme that has been defined for the next three years.

The Global Sustainability Standards Board (GSSB) is currently seeking public comment on its 2023-2025 Work Program. GSSB is soliciting stakeholder feedback on questions including: “Are there any sectors … that should be prioritized for development during the period covered by this work program?”

The results of this petition - to prioritise development of an Education Sector Standard - will be shared with GSSB on Feb 17, 2023 as a response to the solicited feedback. 

Why an Education Sector GRI Standard is a necessity
The power of the GRI Sector Standards lies in two very important aspects:

1. A list of a sector’s most significant impacts is clearly defined in the public interest through a transparent, multi-stakeholder approach (academia, business, experts, governments etc.) which includes a period of public comment.
2. Organisations are required to either show how they are taking action related to these significant impacts, or provide the reason why they consider (a significant impact) not applicable for them (depends on their value chain position). This level of transparency is an extremely powerful driver for change.

A GRI Education Sector Standard will therefore help organisations focus their efforts on their significant impacts as these have been clearly defined through this robust multi stakeholder and transparent GRI process.