Materialities assessment is the cornerstone of your company's sustainability efforts
Businesses can no longer leave to external parties like markets, governments, or civil society to respond to sustainability challenges. It’s in businesses’ interests to take an urgent and proactive role in delivering the transformational change required. Companies need to demonstrate that they are a force for good – and people expect them to; a view amplified by technology and a level of connectivity that enables transparency and much faster scaling of citizen action.
Materialities?
An issue is material if it meets two conditions. Firstly, it impacts the business significantly in terms of growth, cost or risk. And secondly, it is important to the stakeholders – such as investors, society (citizens, NGOs, governments), consumers, customers, suppliers and our employees – and they expect the company to take action on the issue. In determining if an issue is material, the company has to consider our impacts across the value chain.
Identifying
Materiality assessment is the process of identifying, refining, and assessing numerous potential environmental, social and governance issues that could affect your business, and/or your stakeholders, and condensing them into a short-list of topics that inform company strategy, targets, and reporting.
Sense-making
To make a comprehensive assessment of what important and what not, we propose materiality list which makes sense for your business based on existing list coming from similar/other companies reports, industry reports and stakeholders studies.
Grouping
Materialities are being adapted in small groups (this helps for acceptation and speed of process and ensure that everyone can voice what he thinks ) to match materialities to company specific activities, values, history and mindset.
Materialities are then being ranked into a materiality matrix (ranking done by similar companies may be used as a starting point). A consolidation is being done and presented to validate priorities. Then enterprise commitments/engagements (based on top materialities) are being defined and validated.
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