CORPORATE ACTION → MATERIALITY & CONTEXT
Materiality & Context
Understanding what matters – the foundation for everything that follows.
Corporate Sustainability Journey
In 30 Seconds
Before you can set targets, build strategies, or write reports, you need to understand your context. What sustainability issues actually matter for your business? Where do your impacts and dependencies lie? Who are your stakeholders and what do they expect?
The challenge: Sustainability is vast. Without focus, organisations spread resources too thin, chase the wrong priorities, and struggle to demonstrate progress. Materiality assessment cuts through the noise.
The opportunity: A robust materiality assessment creates clarity. It tells you where to focus, what to measure, and how to communicate. Everything else builds from this foundation.
What is Materiality?
Sustainability covers an enormous range of topics – climate change, biodiversity, water, human rights, labour practices, supply chain ethics, data privacy, and dozens more. No organisation can tackle everything equally. Materiality is the process of identifying which issues genuinely matter for your specific business – and critically, for your stakeholders.
Two perspectives matter equally. First, your business: what are your actual impacts on people and planet? What natural and social systems do you depend on? Where are the risks and opportunities? Second, your stakeholders: what do investors, customers, employees, regulators, and communities expect from you? What concerns do they have?
Materiality assessment sits at the intersection of these two perspectives – identifying issues that are significant to your business operations and significant to those with a stake in your performance. Getting this right shapes everything that follows: your strategy, targets, reporting, and resource allocation.
In sustainability terms, “material” means significant enough to warrant attention, resources, and action. But significant to whom, and by what measure? This is where different frameworks diverge.
Financial Materiality
ISSB / UK SRS approach
Issues are material if they could reasonably be expected to influence investors' decisions. The focus is on how sustainability issues affect the company's financial position and prospects.
Question: How does the world affect our business?
Double Materiality
CSRD / ESRS approach
Issues are material if they affect the company financially OR if the company has significant impacts on people and planet. Both directions matter equally.
Question: How does the world affect us AND how do we affect the world?
Practical implication: If you're subject to CSRD, you need double materiality. If you're following ISSB/UK SRS, financial materiality may suffice – but many companies find that considering both perspectives leads to better strategic decisions.
The Materiality Assessment Process
A robust materiality assessment follows a structured process. This isn't a one-off exercise – it should be refreshed annually or when significant changes occur.
1. Identify stakeholders
Who has a stake in your sustainability performance? Investors, customers, employees, suppliers, regulators, communities, NGOs.
Map stakeholder groups, understand their interests, and determine how to engage them.
2. Understand your value chain
Where does your business create value and impact? Upstream suppliers, your operations, downstream customers and products.
Map activities, dependencies, and potential impact hotspots across the value chain.
3. Identify potential issues
What ESG topics could be material? Climate, nature, water, human rights, labour practices, governance, product safety.
Use frameworks (ESRS, GRI, SASB) and sector guidance to ensure comprehensive coverage.
4. Assess significance
Rate each issue on impact (your effect on world) and financial effect (world's effect on you).
Consider scale, scope, likelihood, and remediability. Gather stakeholder input.
5. Prioritise and validate
Determine which issues meet the materiality threshold. Validate with stakeholders and leadership.
Create a materiality matrix or list of material topics. Document your methodology.
6. Connect to strategy
Use material topics to shape strategy, targets, reporting, and resource allocation.
Materiality assessment is the input; strategy and action are the outputs.
Understanding Your Value Chain
Your sustainability impacts and dependencies don't stop at your factory gate or office walls. They extend throughout your value chain – and increasingly, that's where the material issues lie.
Impacts
How does your value chain affect people and planet? Emissions, water use, land use change, labour conditions, community effects. Where are the hotspots?
Dependencies
What does your value chain depend on? Natural resources, ecosystem services, stable climate, skilled workforce, functioning infrastructure. What are your vulnerabilities?
Stakeholder Engagement
Materiality assessment isn't an internal exercise. Understanding what matters requires engaging with those who have a stake in your sustainability performance.
Investors
Risk, returns, ESG performance, disclosure quality
Customers
Product sustainability, supply chain ethics, credentials
Employees
Purpose, working conditions, DEI, climate action
Suppliers
Fair terms, capacity building, long-term relationships
Regulators
Compliance, transparency, due diligence
Communities
Local impacts, employment, environmental quality
Engagement approaches
Surveys and questionnaires, interviews and focus groups, advisory panels, ongoing dialogue, analysis of enquiries and complaints, industry benchmarking. The right mix depends on your context and resources.
Common Pitfalls
Materiality assessment can go wrong in predictable ways. Avoiding these pitfalls leads to more useful outcomes.
Box-ticking exercise
Problem: Doing materiality because you have to, not to inform strategy
Solution: Connect materiality directly to strategic planning and resource allocation
Echo chamber
Problem: Only consulting people who already agree with you
Solution: Include diverse, critical voices. Challenge assumptions.
Static snapshot
Problem: Treating materiality as done once and forgotten
Solution: Refresh annually. Context changes. New issues emerge.
Everything is material
Problem: Failing to prioritise, so nothing gets real focus
Solution: Be disciplined about thresholds. Prioritise ruthlessly.
Where This Fits
Materiality assessment is Stage 2 of the corporate sustainability journey – enabled by governance, and the foundation for everything that follows.
Without materiality assessment, you're guessing. With it, you have a defensible basis for every decision that follows – from governance structures to target-setting to what you include in your sustainability report.
The Pandion View
We believe materiality assessment should be genuinely useful, not just compliant. It should tell you something you didn't know, challenge assumptions, and create clarity about where to focus.
The best materiality assessments are uncomfortable. They reveal inconvenient truths, challenge pet projects, and force difficult prioritisation decisions. That's how you know they're working.
As a hybrid professional, we help clients see their context clearly – connecting corporate reality to the landscapes and systems they depend on. We bring outside perspective and structured process to cut through internal assumptions.