Tag Archives: ESG materiality

Earth Day & Emissions: Net Zero Needed by 2050 to Limit Global Warming

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Emissions must be dramatically reduced within this decade and decline to net zero by 2050 to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

If you follow this blog, you’ve heard us mention our support of efforts to eliminate death on the job by 2050. These efforts are part of the Work to Zero initiative from the National Safety Council. Funded by the McElhattan Foundation, Work to Zero is making innovation more accessible by helping employers explore the value of safety technology and how to determine an organization’s readiness for adopting new technology solutions.

But eliminating death on the job isn’t the only “zero” we’re thinking about. On April 5, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the third part of its Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. The other parts of the report is AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2022 and AR6 Climate Change 2022: … Read more...

The Future of ESG Readiness: How To Use Technology for Strategy and Goal Setting Beyond Compliance 

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The recent SEC proposal for climate-related disclosures proves that not only is ESG here to stay, but that regulatory disclosures are going to become a lot more complex and strategic.

Not long ago, the way businesses interacted with the market was based on simple supply and demand: businesses offered goods and services, customers bought them and the system worked more-or-less as designed. Considerations of environmental impact, social justice and principled governance were important, but because they weren’t standardized or enforced according to any universal benchmarks, they often existed in the more erudite realm of ethics or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and environment, society and corporate (ESG) compliance seemed far away from reality.

Jump ahead a few years to the present day and you’ll see that considerations regarding ESG have changed, and so have the ways we think about risk, stakeholder engagement and materiality. ESG has given consumers and investors the … Read more...

External Materiality and ESG: What You Should Be Looking For

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Material risk management, or materiality, is a concept that is growing in importance as companies try to determine the material threats to their business.

As a business leader thinking about operational risk, do you consider internal risks first? For example, when considering operational risk, are regulatory compliance, talent retention or catastrophic asset failures resulting in production shutdowns top of mind? When you consider external risks, do you land on those that are most obvious, such as shifts in regulatory burdens, currency fluctuations, competitive threats, etc.…? (The list goes on and on.)

Like most leaders, you probably pay attention to ongoing issues, while staying as up to date as possible about evolving challenges and threats to the business so you aren’t caught off guard.

The problem with this approach is that it leaves an organization in an inherently vulnerable position. It’s hard to truly stay up to date. External risks are … Read more...

Four Reasons Why Senior Leaders Should Care about ESG Materiality

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Here are four reasons that will convince even the most skeptical of business leaders on why running an ESG materiality assessment is now more important than ever before. 
If you are finding it difficult to win the attention of your company’s board members and senior leaders over ESG materiality, here are four reasons that will convince even the most skeptical of business leaders on why running a materiality assessment is now more important than ever before. 

A Materiality assessment, when conducted as a strategic process, across key operational areas of the company (sustainability, legal, strategy, risk) and not as an isolated exercise, has proven to produce a number of positive outcomes. 

For instance, a clear assessment of material issues followed by transparent reporting, shows an improvement in a company’s performance while reducing its exposure to different risks – including reputational, financial and legal. Moreover, a credible and detailed explanation of materiality has been determined as a fundamental requirement to attract investors, and a meaningful argument to get the board and executives buy-in. 

(This article is reprinted with permission … Read more...