Preliminary Assessment

To get acquainted with ESG and how sustainability affects your company’s activities, the first step is analysing the situation: how does your company impact ESG issues and how these impact your company? An example on how to analyse the situation is by performing a Double Materiality Assessment, which allows for a clear picture of the situation and to define a roadmap for action. Here’s a detailed overview on how to do it:

1. Understand the business context
We gather information about your company through formularies and focus groups and map your company’s activities, identify the business model, products and services, and recognise all relevant aspects of your upstream and downstream value chain. This way, we get a broad and detailed perspective of the company’s situation and its starting point within ESG and sustainability issues.

2. Identify impact materiality issues (in-out approach):
We identify potential impacts (both current or potential and positive or negative) that the company’s activities may have on Environmental, Social and Governance matters all along the value chain. While identifying the impacts, we aim at fostering stakeholder participation to get a wider view of the situation and ensure the company follows due diligence processes.

3. Identify financial materiality issues (out-in approach):
We identify potential ESG impacts that may affect the normal functioning of the company and its financial situation, such as cost impacts due to climate-related fuel regulations or supply chain due diligence rules.

4. Make a list of risks and opportunities: once both impact assessments have been made, we make a list of the resulting risks and opportunities that are material to the company’s activities and assess their severity and likelihood. Afterwards, we prioritise those risks and opportunities to define future actions that ensure negative issues are tackled and to guarantee positive impacts and opportunities are also considered.

5. Define an action plan or roadmap:
Building upon the list of prioritised risks and opportunities, we define actions that tackle the identified impacts that have been deemed material and relevant to the assessment. Then we can develop a Double Materiality Assessment document and define a set of actions to implement within a defined timeline.