Understand Your Business’s Important ESG Topics
Out of a broad range of sustainability / ESG topics, it is vital for companies to understand which of many possible topics and issues are "material" to their stakeholders. The process of narrowing these topics will vary by stakeholder, therefore G&A uses a multi-stakeholder approach, with a focus on investors, to uncover your most material ESG topics. It is critical for companies to focus efforts and resources on the most material topics and issues to have a successful and well-structured sustainability program that maximizes ROI.
The Materiality Assessment is important to help management:
- Align the sustainability program with stakeholder, constituency concerns
- Prioritize issues for further focus and strategy development
- Select key indicators for disclosure
- Enable focused discussion for strategy development
- Identify gaps in data collection
- Increase the ROI of your sustainability program
Identify Opportunities to Improve Existing Disclosure
Disclosure frameworks and standards — such as GRI, SASB, TCFD (and emerging frameworks such as ISSB and others) — ask for extensive information (data and narrative). It can be difficult to identify and understand existing gaps in your disclosure and reporting that are the most important to fill. There are various ways to accomplish this.
G&A’s unique gap analysis process helps issuers to improve disclosure using these frameworks and standards to lead the way toward more comprehensive and structured ESG reporting. Our comprehensive process includes the below steps:
- Examining existing public disclosure for alignment with leading frameworks and standards
- Gathering non-public information from internal stakeholders with relevant information
- Mapping where existing public and nonpublic information exists
- Identifying gaps where required information is unavailable – guide development for potential disclosure
- Researching industry peers for their disclosure practices for the various framework indicators