FT: Improving environmental performance through analytics

Rod Newing's article in the latest Financial Times sustainability supplement, Analytics: Numbers game is hard to play, points to the main challenge in dealing with environmental analytics: how to produce improved environmental performance from a seemingly unmanageable mass of data. 

As Jyoti Banerjee, partner at Fronesys, commented in the article: "Most companies have not yet gone through the process of determining which environmental metrics are material to them. Without that, you could end up tracking metrics which are fashionable in the marketplace, but not relevant to your business."

Of course, materiality is an ongoing theme for us at the moment, what with our recent publication of the Materiality Futures report. But that's because it makes sense to work through materiality, for it turns out to be the critical join between sustainability and business strategy. 

Sadly, as Materiality Futures demonstrates, so few companies actually seem to have good transparent processes for determining materiality of non-economic impacts. It's time to smarten up here, as materiality is only going to become more material...

Fronesys to conduct deep-dive study on materiality determination

Having recently launched Materiality Futures, a report based on publicly available sustainability impact information from 31 companies, Fronesys is announcing a "deep-dive" shared learning process on the current state-of-the-art in materiality determination.

The objectives of the study are to:

• assess the main processes for materiality determination in a company
• compare materiality rankings from participating companies against published data for 50 separate sustainability issues
• analyse what sort of metrics can be tracked to improve the process of materiality determination in a company
• explore how externalities can be measured and incorporated into the risk and materiality determination processes of a business
• define the state-of-the-art in materiality determination

Interested? Want to talk further about this? Do get in touch: info@fronesys.com. 

Leading companies need to disclose more about their materiality determination processes

Fronesys launches Materiality Futures: joining sustainability to strategy.

As the marketplace applies an increasing focus on sustainability factors, a number of the world’s leading companies are seeking to establish which of their sustainability impacts are material to their business.

The thirty-one companies covered in Materiality Futures, the latest sustainability report from Fronesys, are some of the most transparent, but even with them there is often a real lack of transparency regarding how the materiality process actually works. In particular, the report finds that companies are much more likely to be open about their stakeholders’ understanding of sustainability impacts than their own.

The Materiality Futures report, released today by Fronesys, is authored by Chris Tuppen, partner, corporate services, and is the most comprehensive and detailed evaluation of the materiality determination  process to date. It investigates how materiality is currently used in the sustainability reporting of thirty one leading global companies (A full list of companies evaluated in the study is included in the press release). From the public disclosures of these companies, a total of 50 different sustainability issues are evaluated in the report in terms of importance to stakeholders and the 31 companies.  These cover a diverse range of issues, such as corporate governance, water use, human rights, executive remuneration, carbon and privacy.

Chris Tuppen, partner, corporate services, Fronesys, says: “The report is particularly timely as companies around the world prepare to tie together their financial and sustainability reporting processes into the draft integrated reporting model recently released by the IIRC. In our view, the key link between sustainability and business strategy is materiality, and it is surprising how opaque the processes are by which materiality is determined.”

Read the full press release on the launch of the Materiality Futures report

Check out more information on the Materiality Futures report.

2degrees webinar on Integrated Reporting: Identifying material sustainability issues

Chris Tuppen will be discussing his new report Materiality Futures in a webinar with Jessica Fries of the International Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC) on October 11. The new Fronesys report, which will launch on October 10, features an analysis of sustainability data from 31 leading companies, covering 50 different sustainability issues.

For more information, check out http://www.2degreesnetwork.com/all-activities/event/integrated-reporting-identifying-material-sustainability-issues-2011-10-11/.