So the World Bank, in line with the United Nation’s Millenium Development Goals has the twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared properity. More recently this has included a stronger focus on environmental and social sustainability, which has resulted in a newly released set of global reporting indicators to assist in reading their 2014 Sustainability Review.

The Review itself is a staggering piece of research and takes an extensive look at the work of the World Bank (as it is supposed to), but this new set of indicators takes the form of a taxonomy – a code or an index: a way of grouping together GRI indicators so as to make sense of the whole document. The taxonomy was developed by the World Bank in conjunction with Deloitte, and marks a new leap in the interpretation of GRI coding. Think of it as the sustainability reporting equivalent of cracking the human genome (ok well not quite) but it’s pretty exciting to see more rigour applied to reporting at a global level. If an organisation the size of the World Bank can do it, certainly there are other global corporate entities that could do the same.

To read more about these new pieces of knowledge (if you really want to nerd out!) you can find the Taxonomy here, and the World Bank Sustainability Review 2014 here.