GRI 102 - Aitken Spence

About Aitken Spence

Aitken Spence PLC is one of Sri Lanka’s most diversified and long-standing conglomerates, with more than 150 years of history. It has a footprint spanning across 12 countries and 16 diverse business segments including hospitality and travel, logistics and maritime services, power generation, plantations, manufacturing, financial services and other specialised services.

Many of these segments operate in climate-sensitive or resource-intensive environments. For example, tourism depends on stable ecosystems, plantations rely on predictable weather and water availability, logistics networks face disruptions from extreme weather, and power generation is directly linked to global energy transitions. These operations also have a considerable resource footprint that needs to be monitored and controlled.

Aitken Spence has been an early and influential voice in Sri Lanka’s sustainability movement. The Group is recognised for pioneering investments that pushed boundaries in green building and sustainable operations. These include:

• The world’s first LEED-certified hotel (Heritance Kandalama resort), which is also the first LEED-certified building outside the USA.
• The first LEED-certified property in the Maldives (Heritance Aarah resort hotel).
• South Asia’s first LEED-certified green printing facility.
• Sri Lanka’s first and only waste-to-energy power plant.

Aitken Spence PLC is also one of the few large-scale conglomerates in Sri Lanka to appoint a female Chairperson. Beyond operational innovation, Aitken Spence has maintained a strong global commitment to responsible business. The company is one of Sri Lanka’s longest-standing signatories to the UN Global Compact (since 2002) and among the world’s earliest adopters of the Women’s Empowerment Principles (since 2011).

Aitken Spence is the only company in Sri Lanka to have been ranked among the country’s Top Ten Corporate Citizens for an unmatched 19 consecutive years and entered the Hall of Fame having won the title of Best Corporate Citizen five times.

“Growing with the GRI Standards shaped our reporting culture and sharpened our understanding of impacts. The GRI Standards also helped to build the systems that now support our transition to IFRS S2 and SBTi-aligned climate action. The GRI’s emphasis on materiality kept us focused on what truly matters to our organisation and helped us strengthen our sustainability strategy and tell our own story with clarity and purpose.”

Reporting background

With this track record, it is no surprise that Aitken Spence was also an early mover in transparent sustainability reporting, aligning with the GRI Standards as far back as 2007/08.

The group began its emissions-reporting journey in the 2010/11 Annual Report, aligned with the GRI G3 Guidelines, with initial disclosures under EN16 and EN18. This early adoption introduced the Group to the fundamentals of climate reporting, including setting emission boundaries, understanding data requirements, assessing the availability and accuracy of emission factors, and ensuring transparency.

In the initial years, emissions data was available only for the hotels segment, as other business units lacked the necessary systems. However, the guidance provided through GRI helped reporting teams identify data gaps, define requirements, and begin building the internal processes needed to collect information across all businesses.

As GRI’s standards evolved, so did Aitken Spence’s reporting, gradually formalizing methodologies, improving data consistency, and expanding emissions coverage across all business segments and geographies.

GRI helped shape both the organisation’s sustainability strategy and its internal reporting systems by promoting double materiality-driven priorities, clear boundaries, and consistent data management. Growing with GRI enhanced the Group’s understanding of its impacts and gradually embedded the discipline needed for climate considerations in decision-making.

(The reporting history table “Aitken Spence’s journey with GRI, emission reporting and climate reporting in a nutshell” would remain here as a timeline/box.)

The context 

This combination of sectoral diversity and geographical spread places environmental transparency, impact control, and climate resilience at the core of long-term business sustainability for the Group.

These practices supported Aitken Spence’s broader philosophy of “Build Better Before” and laid the foundation for the Group’s smooth transition into double materiality, comprising GRI and IFRS-aligned climate reporting, SBTi commitments, and a more comprehensive climate strategy.

The challenge 

 Aitken Spence needed to strengthen emissions reporting across its diverse business segments, creating a reliable system that could address both climate impacts and risks. Its experience with GRI 305 provided the foundation for the next stage: preparing for GRI 102, IFRS S2 and SBTi-aligned climate action. 

In the early years, emissions data was available only for selected business segments, while other operations lacked the systems needed to collect and manage information consistently. The organisation needed to define reporting boundaries, establish methodologies, improve data quality, and develop processes capable of supporting increasingly sophisticated climate disclosures.

The approach

One of Aitken Spence’s distinct strengths is that all emissions-related work has always been done in-house, from data gathering and calculations to writing disclosures.

Each business segment maintains a cross-functional sustainability team, with segmental leads forming the Group’s main Sustainability Team. Team members understood the operational context behind the data and identified data owners within each segment, assigned guidance on required information, and integrated them into the sustainability structure.

Although this model required sustained awareness-building, continuous follow-up, and considerable trial and error, it created deep institutional knowledge, data ownership, and continuity.

Its value became especially evident during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when strong in-house capacity enabled Aitken Spence to calculate emissions in time to complete its Annual Report and submit disclosures to the Colombo Stock Exchange without reliance on external consultants.

Consistent leadership support further reinforced this culture, with a Main Board member providing direct oversight at monthly sustainability meetings.

DRR as a Natural Bridge to Climate Reporting

From 2017/18, the Group began developing its Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) strategy.

While DRR focused on identifying vulnerabilities to natural and man-made disasters affecting people, assets, data, supply chains, and operations, the way these assessments were structured was shaped by what the organisation had already developed for GRI impact reporting.

The discipline of materiality assessment, impact prioritisation, and consistent performance indicators provided a strong foundation for planning meaningful action for DRR.

A clear example was the development of location-based maps. Aitken Spence initially created location maps to meet GRI requirements for biodiversity-related disclosures and later adapted the same approach to map exposure to hazards such as floods, droughts, landslides, and earthquakes across operations.

The combined experience of GRI-aligned reporting and DRR strategy development gave Aitken Spence a strong head start in preparing for GRI 102 Climate Change requirements, SBTi target setting, and IFRS S2 climate disclosures.

The result

These initiatives have strengthened Capricorn's governance, risk management, data infrastructure, and internal capacity, creating the institutional foundation needed to embed sustainability across operations.

Collectively, they have positioned the Group to translate double materiality insights into structured, and forward-looking disclosures that align with global best practice while reflecting its unique regional context.

Through the double materiality process, Capricorn has established a strong foundation for aligning purpose with performance, positioning the organisation to meet the evolving expectations of investors, regulators, and society.

Lessons learnt

The combined reporting and DRR journey enabled:

• Established emissions inventories and baselines, including consistent Scope 1 and Scope 2 data and early Scope 3 assessments informed by GRI reporting.
• Standardized, GRI-aligned data-management practices across segments and geographies, supported by well-defined organizational boundaries.
• Climate risk awareness and foundational capability, shaped by DRR frameworks, enabling early identification of emissions hotspots and preliminary mitigation pathway modeling.
• Recognition of methodological limitations and national data gaps.

The company’s progression from GRI G3 to G3.1, G4 and ultimately GRI 305 marked a turning point in how Aitken Spence approached climate reporting.

GRI 305 sharpened the company’s emissions-accounting discipline and brought clarity to mitigation efforts, allowing the company to articulate not only what was reduced, but why those reductions mattered and where future efforts should focus.

At the same time, the company’s DRR frameworks strengthened adaptation planning by helping teams visualise vulnerabilities and anticipate operational disruptions.

Conclusions 

1. The company’s progression from GRI G3 to GRI 305 deepened its understanding of what to measure, how to measure it, and how to translate data into meaningful insight.
2. Together, GRI-driven mitigation and DRR-led adaptation created a balanced, organization-wide approach to climate action. The new topics included in GRI 102: Climate Change bring together requirements and guidance on mitigation and adaptation, enabling more comprehensive data collection and reporting.

This dual foundation significantly accelerated Aitken Spence’s readiness for the more rigorous expectations of IFRS S2 and the long-term ambition embedded in its SBTi targets.