Measurement · Double materiality
Double materiality, done as an evidenced assessment.
What your business does to people and the environment, and what those issues do to your business. Under CSRD this assessment decides what you have to report, so it has to be defensible.
Talk to usTwo directions, one assessment.
Impact materiality asks how your activities affect people and the environment, across your own operations and your value chain. Financial materiality asks how sustainability issues affect your cash flows, cost base, access to capital and market access. A topic is material if it clears either test.
Under CSRD the assessment is the gatekeeper: it determines which ESRS topics you report and, just as importantly, which you are entitled to leave out. Getting it wrong in either direction is costly. Too broad and you report on things you cannot evidence. Too narrow and an assurer challenges the omission.
Value chain, not just the head office.
In fashion the significant impacts sit upstream, in fibre production, wet processing and cut-and-sew, and downstream in use and disposal. An assessment that stops at your own four walls will miss almost everything that matters and will not survive review.
We scope the assessment across the value chain and record where visibility ends, so the boundary is stated rather than assumed.
Stakeholder engagement that leaves a record.
The standards expect affected stakeholders, including workers in the supply chain and communities, to inform the assessment. We design engagement that is proportionate and documented: who was consulted, how, what they said and how it changed the outcome.
Thresholds, scoring and sign-off.
Severity, scale, scope, irremediability and likelihood on the impact side; magnitude and probability on the financial side. We set thresholds before scoring, apply them consistently, and put the result through governance so the board has visibly owned it.
Every topic in or out carries a written rationale. That rationale is the first thing an assurer reads.
From material topics to disclosure.
The assessment output feeds directly into your reporting plan: material topics map to ESRS datapoints, datapoints map to owners and sources, and the gaps become a workplan for the year. It also tells you where to focus reduction and due diligence effort, which is the more useful result.
We refresh the assessment on a defined cycle, because materiality moves as regulation, supply base and exposure change.
What you get
Deliverables
Topic long list
Sector and value-chain issues screened from the standards
Impact and financial scoring
Thresholds set in advance and applied consistently
Stakeholder engagement log
Who was consulted and how it shaped the result
Material topic matrix
The topics that clear either test, with rationale
Omission rationale
A written basis for every topic excluded
Reporting workplan
Material topics mapped to ESRS datapoints and owners
Find out what you actually have to report.
Start with the free assessment: your likely material topics, the evidence you already hold, and what a full double materiality exercise would involve. If you would rather talk it through, book a call instead.
Free. 90 minutes of your team's time. Written findings back within 10 working days.