Materiality Assessment
Materiality assessments are increasingly required by both regulatory and voluntary sustainability frameworks, but they are also a critical strategic tool in their own right. The process helps pinpoint and prioritise the full range of social and environmental impacts a business needs to manage to remain resilient in a changing world and is therefore a critical underpinning to any sustainability strategy.
At Greenheart, we support our clients with financial, impact, and double materiality. Our approach is flexible, shaped by your drivers, internal capacity and existing expertise, and informed by the latest industry guidance and best practice.
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Identify and prioritise your organisation’s material issues through a robust, stakeholder-informed process that supports strategy, reporting and long-term resilience.
What do we offer?
We work with clients to gain a thorough understanding of the company’s operating context, impacts along the value chain, and derived risks and opportunities. Our process meets a variety of strategic and legislative requirements (e.g. ESRS, IFRS, B Corp) and typically includes:
- Comprehensive context mapping: developing a full picture of the businesses operating environment (including value chain, stakeholders, and regulatory landscape)
- ESG Impact, Risk, and Opportunity (IRO) Analysis: applying a robust, evidence-based methodology to assess material ESG factors affecting your business and its stakeholders. (Hint: the environment itself can be a stakeholder!)
- Stakeholder engagement: consulting key stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, customers, industry partners and affected communities
- Leadership engagement and alignment: involving senior leadership to ensure understanding and buy-in, while maintaining an objective, data-driven assessment
- Disclosure and management strategy: identifying regulatory and voluntary reporting requirements, and highlighting opportunities for ongoing management and communication of material issues to stakeholders
How is our approach different?
We are, first and foremost, sustainability and impact experts. Our approach to materiality combines your internal sector/company knowledge with technical, data-led insights from our subject matter experts. We are flexible in our approach: we can lead the whole process or empower internal teams to lead it. Either way, we will leave you engaged, upskilled and empowered.
We can advise or lead on engaging stakeholders, including with those whose voices are less often heard. We can also act as a voice for Nature to provide a truly holistic assessment of your impacts. Once the assessment process is complete, we can work with you to ensure it translates into pragmatic actions, either through new strategy creation or by weaving the insights into your existing company governance.
Materiality assessments are long term tools that should be updated regularly and used to guide strategy. Our approach leaves you with the confidence and capability to make the most of your assessment beyond the end of the project.
Ultimately, our process delivers a clear and prioritised understanding of your organisation’s material issues, backed by a robust methodology and supported by upskilling and co-creation with your team, so it can be revisited as your context changes.
Related services:
- Sustainability Strategy
- ESG Reporting, Compliance & Disclosure
- Carbon and Net Zero
- B Corp Certification
- Environmental Management
- Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
- Supply chain engagement and sustainability
- Nature and biodiversity impact
- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Sustainable Product Design
- Human rights & social impact
- Team engagement, training and empowerment (including Climate Fresk)
What do our clients say?
“Working with the Greenheart team is always a pleasure and a positive experience. In this project, we really got to tap into their breadth of expertise and use that to build a DMA process we have confidence in”
Liz Edwards - Supply, Operations and Sustainability Director
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