Impact Transparency Review 2025

Sustainability management and reporting, understood as the processes by which companies identify, measure, monitor, and disclose their material environmental, social, and governance risks, opportunities, and impacts, has become increasingly essential to how businesses build competitiveness, resilience, and trust in today’s economy. At the same time, sustainability management and reporting are a critical foundation for system-level impact transparency, particularly when adopted consistently across value chains. Yet for most small and medium enterprises (SMEs)—especially in emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs)—the business case remains unclear, and the pathway to implementation often feels out of reach. Limited resources, capacity and technical know-how, combined with emerging sustainability-related reporting requirements designed primarily for large corporations, make it difficult for SMEs to engage meaningfully.

Outcomes of the 2025 GSG Global Leadership Meeting in Kyoto, Japan, where 136 impact leaders from 45 countries gathered to advance the impact economy. It details key discussions, new resources launched, and actionable strategies developed for mobilising capital, financing SMEs, influencing government policy, and improving impact transparency.

The GSG Impact Partnership reached a pivotal moment, now spanning 46 countries and covering 65% of the world’s population. Our work in 2024 was centred around (i) advancing impact economies by expanding our community and nurturing ecosystem growth (ii) mobilising private capital at scale, especially in emerging markets, and (iii) enabling greater inclusivity in global sustainability disclosure standards.