Double Materiality to Prepare for Building a Comprehensive and Integrated ESG Strategy
Client:
Publicly-held manufacturer.
Opportunity:
An international, private manufacturing company wanted to begin to build their ESG strategy by first identifying the ESG topics most important to the company and their stakeholders through a double materiality assessment.
Solution:
The Uplift team collaborated with our client’s ESG lead and core team to conduct secondary research and engage with key internal and external stakeholders to determine a list of eight material topics with definitions as the client’s key priorities for building their ESG strategy.
Secondary research: The Uplift team reviewed the medical device industry landscape trends for ESG, relevant legislation to our client, and assessed peer/competitor ESG strategies and activities. This informed the first list of priority topics for the client to assess with their key stakeholders.
Stakeholder engagement: With support from the client’s ESG team, the Uplift team created two unique surveys with education materials about ESG and double materiality assessments. The surveys were distributed and returned with high response rates (nearly 60% for internal stakeholders and 25% for external stakeholders, above industry average).
Outcomes:
The client developed key focus areas based on a robust and reliable assessment of industry trends and key stakeholder engagement. They were able to better establish lines of communication with key stakeholders and indicate the involvement of their perspective into the client’s priority ESG areas. With the final material topics, the client established an updated governance structure to create better internal feedback loops regarding their priority areas. The assessment will also set the baseline for the client to comply with the CSRD.