Cultural sustainability in reference to the global reporting initiative (GRI) guidelines

• Published in: Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development
• Main Authors: Lähtinen, Katja, Myllyviita, Tanja
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Emerald 2015
• Subjects: karelia*
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/jchmsd-06-2013-0025; http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full-xml/10.1108/JCHMSD-06-2013-0025; https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JCHMSD-06-2013-0025/full/xml; https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JCHMSD-06-2013-0025/full/html

Purpose – Forest industries affect cultural sustainability profoundly, but little information exists on integration of cultural sustainability aspects into their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) management. Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines comprising assessments of economic, ecological and social aspects are one of the most comprehensive CSR frameworks applied widely also in forest industries. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate, how the GRI guidelines encompass cultural sustainability when assessing forestry and forest industry operations in a global context and to recognize the cultural sustainability themes that need additional information in forest industry companies’ CSR reporting. Design/methodology/approach – In the qualitative analysis, expert interview material on indicators identified for assessing the cultural sustainability of forest bioenergy production in North Karelia was compared with the contents of the GRI guidelines. The focus on classifying the cultural indicators according to GRI contents was to recognize in the context of forest bioenergy production, the links between cultural sustainability and other sustainability dimensions and to illustrate the new themes that cultural sustainability integration would bring to CSR management of the business. In addition, information was acquired from the general themes of cultural sustainability which are currently lacking from the GRI guidelines. Findings – The results of the show that most of the cultural indicators in the expert interview material were associated with aspects of economic, environmental or social sustainability when classified according to the GRI guidelines. Despite this, it seems that a more profound integration of cultural sustainability evaluations in CSR management is required. The analysis of this study showed that the themes “Impacts on landscape,” “Timeline of impacts,” “Spiritual values,” “Persistence of traditions” and “Adaptability to cultural change” are not approached in the GRI guidelines at all. ...