Using Materiality Analysis to Determine Actual and Potential Company Impacts on Sustainable Development

Abstract

To contribute to sustainable development companies are called to identify and manage their impacts in a transparent and reliable manner. Materiality Analysis in sustainability reporting helps companies determine the threshold at which sustainability topics become sufficiently important to be included in the report, according to significant organisation’s impacts and to stakeholder’s interests and concerns. To deliver the highest level of transparency for organisational impacts on the economy, environment, and people, the latest version of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines, the “Universal Standard 2021”, propose to identify and assess both actual and potential material impacts. In light of this suggestion, the present paper proposes the Materiality Cube as a practical and structured approach for supporting the analysis of organisation’s impacts. The proposed tool allows to evaluate the materiality of impacts considering the company’s strategy, sustainability performance and stakeholder expectations. By comparing the positioning of sustainability topics under the three assessment dimensions, companies can improve the overall process of determining materiality and the accountability towards stakeholders: they can act to address and account for the most material impacts and identify those that could become material over time since they result much more significant from one perspective than the others. An illustrative application of the proposed Materiality Cube completes the paper.

 Keywords: Materiality Analysis, Sustainability Reporting, Sustainability Impacts, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Guidelines, Stakeholder engagement