A new proprietary standard for reporting corporate sustainability performance claims to make sustainability reports simpler and contextual.

The non-profit Center for Sustainable Innovation (CSI) has entered what has been a narrowing field of standard setting for corporate responsibility reporting with the launch of its True Sustainability Index(TM) (TSI).

Whereas there is much emphasis in other reporting standards on tracking trend data and internal efficiencies, the TSI claims to focus on a company's performance relative to the actual resources available. Performing better than last year or than peers is all very well, the rationale goes, unless the contextual information about resource availability suggests that resource use is clearly unsustainable.

CSI's Executive Director, Mark W. McElroy, argues that "Whereas GRI has long advocated for the inclusion of context in non-financial reporting, we have finally found a way to do it, and at the same time have reduced GRI-type reporting from 150 metrics to 15!"