The Global Reporting Initiative and investment firm RobecoSAM have published a guide that explores materiality from a sustainability reporter’s perspective, as expounded in GRI reports, and compares this with the investor perspective of materiality, as formulated by RobecoSAM.
In Defining Materiality: What Matters to Reporters and Investors, GRI and RobecoSAM analyzed data from two sectors: technology hardware and equipment as well as banks and diverse financials.
Analysis of material aspects listed in GRI reports and of RobecoSAM’s investor-focused materiality assessments revealed an overall high degree of overlap between the topics reporting organizations consider material and those considered material by investors.
Late last year SustainAbility launched a tool to help companies improve transparency in their sustainability reporting by focusing on gathering and providing information on the most material issues.
