ESG Action Plan

Materiality means that a particular ESG factor has a significant (or material) impact on a particular company. Some ESG issues might be material for companies in a specific industry (e.g. water stress can disrupt the operations of mining or beverages companies, which rely heavily on clean water in their production processes), but not for other sectors (e.g. water stress has little impact on media or financial companies). Companies and investors perform materiality assessments as a technique for distinguishing between important ESG factors and nonimportant ones.

Our consultants work with you on your materiality assessment by summarising action on ESG topics across 41 goals. These goals are spread across multiple areas of ESG and take into account existing ESG frameworks. These goals align with recognised ESG disclosures and will help frame your ultimate ESG efforts. The material goals identified are the ones we consider most relevant for your organisation based on this gap analysis.

ESG consultants help companies determine what actions they should take to improve and build on their ESG efforts. They can undertake risk assessments, due diligence and impact assessments, as well as help prepare reports and measure impacts.

But hiring an ESG consultant is not enough in and of itself. An ESG consultant who does not have the executive team’s backing or does not have significant authority or resources to operate will not be successful. Indeed, hiring an ESG consultant but doing nothing else to embed sustainability into the organisation could be a sign of “greenwashing,” where companies spend time and energy in order to market themselves as sustainable but do nothing to actually change their practices.

In short, an ESG consultant can be a good hire only if your business is ready to commit to concrete ESG steps.

Start by putting together an ESG committee. Spend some time making sure you have the right people around the table, that you have board buy-in, and have a clearly defined output such as annual report pages or a specific ESG report. Then start looking at the data you do have. Identify missing policies and procedures you should have in place. Figure out your social commitments and diversity measures, and decide how you are going to track and report on all this. It might start with a spreadsheet, but things will soon get more complicated and at that point, it would be time to think about a system like our ESG reporting and tracking tool which can track and report on all this data for you.