Top tips for an effective double materiality assessment

For those companies in scope to report against the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and to publish your reports for the first time in 2025, there is a mandatory requirement to undertake a double materiality assessment early on in the process. This is to make sure that the subsequent sustainability issues you focus on are material to your organisation and your stakeholders. In addition, it’s a useful way of identifying your key impacts, risks and to listen to the needs and expectations of your stakeholders.

A double materiality assessment looks at issues from both an ‘inside-out’ and an ‘outside-in’ perspective. The outside-in perspective is typically what organisations reported against historically – the issues that impact an organisation financially; this is often referred to as a ‘materiality assessment’. A double materiality assessment goes beyond this and also considers the environmental and social impact of the organisation on the world (inside-out).

What makes an effective double materiality assessment?

1. Understand risks and impacts in the industry

Understand the material impacts for your industry both now and in the future e.g. over the next 5-10 years. With risk analysis and identification of material sustainability topics, it’s important to understand what could be coming and what you need to be prepared for. Properly consider legislation, investor demands and customer preferences.

2. Engage the right stakeholders

Carry out a detailed stakeholder mapping exercise that identifies both internal and external stakeholders and their influence and impact. Identify which stakeholders need to be managed most closely and engage them in further discussions, interviews and workshops. For those stakeholders identified as lower influence and impact, don’t discount them. They still have relevant inputs and opinions to share, whether that’s through a high-level survey or ongoing stakeholder engagement.

3. Ensure senior management buy-in

When engaging with senior management, aim for executive buy-in by clearly highlighting the benefits, including: increased transparency; risk mitigation; long-term value creation and enhanced reputation. Senior management must be involved in the assessment so make sure you have the right people from your organisation involved and do not skip this stage

4. Communicate findings

Once you have identified your material issues and common themes, hold a ‘testing workshop’ with the stakeholders you previously engaged, both internal and external. Test the assumptions you’ve made and the findings you’ve presented with them and get their opinion and input. Remember, stakeholders should be involved throughout the whole process, not only at the beginning.

5. Ask yourself ‘So what?’

Once you’ve finalised your double materiality assessment, engage stakeholders to find out ‘so what?’ :

• What does it now mean for you?
• How do you make sure you’re translating the findings into actionable tasks?
• How are you ensuring that the results are being incorporated into your strategic outlook?

Final thoughts

Finally, make sure you do something with your finalised assessment – share it with your stakeholders; report it to CSRD; include it within your annual report; make sure the results, findings and actions are integrated into your sustainability strategy and action plans moving forward.

For more information or to explore how Action Sustainability can support your organisation, please contact our team.