Tag: 3BL

Comcast Corporation published its 2024 Green Bond Report, which outlines the full allocation of proceeds from its inaugural green bond issued in February 2023.

$995 million in net proceeds were focused on green buildings, circular economy, clean transportation, energy efficiency, and renewable energy, all in accordance with its Green Financing Framework. These investment categories support environmental efforts as part of Comcast’s goal to be carbon neutral by 2035.

“We’re proud to have offered investors the opportunity to support greener operations at Comcast that ultimately benefit people and the planet.”

Sara Cronenwett

Senior Vice President of Corporate Environmental Sustainability at Comcast

Comcast has reduced its market-based, enterprise-wide Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30% from 2019 to year-end 2023.

“Whether it’s through the design and construction of green buildings that integrate clean technologies and other sustainability features, or circularity projects that extend the life of devices and keep waste out of landfills, these investments will deliver tangible environmental benefits for years to come,” said Sara Cronenwett, Senior Vice President of Corporate Environmental Sustainability at Comcast.

Project highlights included:

Sky Studios Elstree: Completing construction in 2023 as the UK’s newest, state-of-the-art film and TV studio, Sky Studios Elstree was awarded a mark of ‘Outstanding’ by albert in its Studio Sustainability Standard Report 2024. Sky Studios Elstree purchases and matches 100% renewable electricity, approximately 25% of which comes from 2.9 MW of solar capacity across the studio’s rooftops. Other sustainability features include rainwater harvesting, LED lighting, EV charging points and an all-electric operations vehicle fleet.Electric Vehicles: Funds were allocated to clean transportation initiatives, including select electric vans and pickups for Xfinity service technicians, as well as a large fleet of electric and solar-powered golf carts for production and operations crews at the Universal Studios Lot.Circularity by Design: Comcast maintains longstanding refurbishing programs that reduce waste by enabling reuse of certain devices until the end of a product’s life. This includes programs to test, refurbish and repair returned devices. Comcast also has a National Recycling Program, aiming to recycle or divert cable equipment waste from landfills through recovery and redistribution of materials.

To learn more about Comcast’s full green bond allocation, please download its 2024 Green Bond Report. For more information on Comcast’s environmental efforts, visit the Environment page at corporate.comcast.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This communication includes estimates, projections and statements regarding plans and goals that may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. For more information on these statements, please see https://corporate.comcast.com/impact/environment/forward-looking-statements.

Originally published in International Paper’s 2023 Sustainability Report

International Paper is also championing water conservation through an educational outreach program. We are partnering with local schools in our communities to foster awareness and instill a sense of responsibility towards this precious resource. At the heart of this initiative is our Water is Wonderful curriculum, which we developed to educate 1st through 3rdgrade students on what it means to be a good steward of the water we have.

In engaging lessons, children learn that water is essential to life and makes up more than 2/3 of our planet, though only a small fraction of that water is available for use by the billions of people on Earth. From the scarcity of clean, fresh water to how International Paper uses water in our paper-making process, students learn not only about the vital role water plays in our daily lives but also how International Paper uses water in its processes to make products people depend on every day. The Water is Wonderful program also contributes to our signature cause of education by teaching water conservation in schools and demonstrating how responsible water practices are good for our facilities, our company, our communities and our planet.

Read more

About International Paper

International Paper (NYSE: IP) is a global producer of sustainable packaging, pulp and other fiber-based products, and one of the world’s largest recyclers. Headquartered in Memphis, Tenn., we employ approximately 39,000 colleagues globally who are committed to creating what’s next. We serve customers worldwide, with manufacturing operations in North America, Latin America, North Africa and Europe. Net sales for 2023 were $18.9 billion. Additional information can be found by visiting internationalpaper.com/.

About International Paper – EMEA

In Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA), International Paper focuses on the production and marketing of fiber-based packaging and specialty pulp, employing approximately 4,400 people. As a leading supplier of high-quality corrugated containers for a multitude of applications, we serve customers throughout the region from our network of two recycled containerboard mills and 23 box plants in France, Italy, Morocco, Portugal and Spain. Specialty pulp is made in Gdansk, Poland. Other products available from International Paper in the region include a variety of Kraft linerboard and other pulp products.

I have been with Quest Diagnostics since 1993, celebrating my 31 years with the company this past July. My entire career has been in Logistics. I began my career as a courier, working for what then was Nichols Institute. For the next several years, we experienced transitions to Corning Clinical Laboratories and ultimately to Quest Diagnostics.

The big change came when Quest Diagnostics bought Smith Kline Beecham Clinical Laboratories. We went from working out of a space about the size of a four-car garage to the much larger lab in Kansas City, MO. This acquisition allowed many opportunities for upward growth. My position changed from courier to stock clerk in their huge warehouse. I quickly moved up to become the Group Lead, working for Ken Johnson. My period of upward mobility with Quest Diagnostics had taken off.

After years of both personal and professional growth, Quest Diagnostics acquired LabOne clinical reference laboratories, which was in Lenexa, KS. The first few years in Lenexa were some of the most challenging and rewarding in my career. I had a great deal of responsibility before, during, and after our entire staff moved there. I became the route administrator for the region, logistics supervisor over Joplin and Springfield, MO, and ultimately transitioned to my current title of Network Planner and Route Optimization Specialist for the Greater Midwest Region.

My time with Quest Diagnostics has been quite remarkable. I have met people from all levels of society, traveled places I thought I would never see, made many close friendships, and learned so much about leadership, collaboration, and teamwork. I have enjoyed some of the best years of my life working for Quest Diagnostics. I would not change these past 31 years with the company for anything.

For more than 125 years, Dow has been at the forefront of innovation in materials science, and as the world continues to accelerate toward a more digital, more connected future, we will continue to drive innovation for a sustainable electronics future.

I remember when getting in touch with family and friends in Shanghai required more than just a few taps on a smart phone. Now, staying connected is easier than ever – and our global digital transformation only continues to accelerate. Whether in business or for personal use, consumers demand communication technologies that are faster, sleeker and more reliable.

In my role at Dow, I see first-hand how our customers in the electronics industry are working to enable faster computing, more storage capacity and greater connectivity – all while designing personal devices that are thinner, lighter, foldable and wearable. At the same time, the growth of artificial intelligence, block chain and other cloud services is fueling demand for increased computing power in data centers. This presents a number of challenges for the industry, especially when it comes to producing technology that is more energy efficient and safer for the environment.

At Dow, we are committed to protecting the climate and delivering a more sustainable future through our materials science expertise. That’s why we are working alongside our customers to develop electronics solutions that not only enhance product performance and improve reliability and efficiency, but also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enable the use of fewer critical resources.

Minimizing the environmental impact of data centers

The future of digital communications depends on reliable cloud and data centers. And as this industry continues to expand, so does its impact on the environment.

Data centers require a great deal of energy to operate and maintain. In 2022, data centers accounted for 2% of all global electricity usage. The United States is home to a third of the world’s data centers, and those data centers could account for 6% of the nation’s electricity usage by 2026. The push for more data, faster, means more heat – and that means more energy is required for data center cooling.

To help our customers reduce energy usage and improve performance, Dow provides a range of cooling solutions, including:

DOWSIL™ Immersion Cooling Technology, which enables a revolutionary new cooling method through silicones chemistry. This low-carbon solution delivers optimal cooling and thermal management, while reducing costs and saving space.DOWFROST™ LC Heat Transfer Fluid, which enables efficient heat removal in datacom equipment cooling systems.DOWSIL™ Thermal Conductive Material – Thermal Gel, Grease and Gum, a comprehensive portfolio to enhance heat dispassion and device reliability.

For more than 125 years, Dow has been at the forefront of innovation in materials science, and as the world continues to accelerate toward a more digital, more connected future, we will continue to drive innovation for a sustainable electronics future.

Joyce Liu, Global Marketing Director, Dow Consumer Solutions

About the author

Joyce Liu is the Global Marketing Director for Dow’s Consumer Solutions (DCS) business. In this role, she is responsible for leading the global Consumer Solutions marketing team to drive short-term and long-term growth strategy, and collaborate cross-functionally to deliver on business objectives. Joyce joined Dow through the Dow Corning acquisition and has been a part of Team Dow for nearly 15 years, holding a variety of marketing and commercial leadership roles including Marketing Director for Greater China for DCS and Global Director of Marketing Excellence for Dow. Her personal interests are traveling, exploring different cultures and wine tasting.

Meet four Cisco Foundation partners working to support farmers’ transition to regenerative practices to improve resiliency and mitigate the climate crisis.

As the world faces the impacts of climate change, such as soil degradation, biodiversity die-off, and water pollution, regenerative agriculture has emerged as a pathway to restore our relationship with the earth and the food it provides us.

Regenerative agriculture practices like cover cropping, no-till farming, and crop rotation help restore organic matter in soil, increasing its ability to retain water and nutrients. Healthy soil is not only more productive but also resilient to droughts and floods, reducing the risks for farmers and stabilizing crop yields. These practices can also enhance the soil’s ability to sequester carbon, turning farms into carbon sinks rather than sources of emissions. Regenerative agricultural practices not only mitigate the climate crisis in the first place, but can also help improve farmer crop yield, increase income, and provide a buffer to climate shocks.

However, the transition to regenerative agriculture is not without challenges. The shift often comes with financial and administrative burdens, especially for smallholder farmers who are pioneering these new practices. Farmers may need to invest in new machinery, seeds for cover crops, and time to learn new techniques as well as provide evidence of their climate impact — all of which come with financial inputs. Applying for grants, loans, or subsidies to support the transition can also be time-consuming and complex, placing an additional burden on farmers already juggling the day-to-day demands of running their farms. These challenges pose barriers to widespread adoption.

In 2021, the Cisco Foundation committed US$100 million over 10 years to fund nonprofit grants and impact investing in climate solutions. Across the Foundation, we apply a multi-sector approach across all our sector areas to create a world of equitable, resilient, and empowered communities contributing to a regenerative climate future. Meet four Cisco Foundation partners that are paving the way for regenerative agricultural practices to happen more efficiently, equitably, and at greater scale.

One Acre Fund: Climate resilience for Sub-Saharan African farmers

The majority of people living in poverty around the globe are smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, who are increasingly caught between two of this century’s defining challenges: extreme poverty and climate change. In Africa, these challenges are mutually reinforcing — farmers in poverty, lacking other income avenues, often resort to deforestation, land conversion, nutrient mining, and other unsustainable practices to survive. Over time, these actions degrade the environment, worsen climate change, lead to yield declines and higher risk to frequent shocks like floods and droughts. This cycle can devastate harvests, leaving smallholders without enough food for their families.

One Acre Fund (1AF) provides farmers with financing, training, and supplies to transform their harvests through a climate strategy focused on adaptation (building resilience to climate shocks) and mitigation (sustainably increasing yields and protecting resources). The strategy is based on four pillars: maximizing plant health; building soil fertility; crop and income diversity; and providing safety nets. The Cisco Foundation has supported 1AF to pioneer a new, tech-enabled approach to the data collection needed to drive this work forward at scale: remote sensing (RS).

RS technology is poised to significantly improve 1AF’s ability to efficiently access and leverage robust and accurate data, enabling deepened climate resilience and impact for Africa’s smallholder farmers. For example, RS data can increase the accuracy of insurance products, ensuring that farmers’ investments are protected when their crops are lost to climate shocks. 1AF is using this technology to offer farmers precise field-level guidance on seed type, planting times, soil maintenance, and more, generating better results than current district-level guidance.

Mad Agriculture: Supporting Regenerative farmers in the United States

Founded in 2018, Mad Agriculture takes a holistic approach to helping farmers in the United States thrive in regenerative organic agriculture. The organization’s mission is to create a regenerative revolution in agriculture, envisioning a world where land, sea, and people flourish together. Mad Agriculture offers a suite of services that help farmers and ranchers overcome technical, financial, and market barriers, and lifting their stories of success and challenge into wider society to spark cultural change.

To succeed, farming and ranching must be done in harmony with nature and the greater ecosystem. This can both reduce conventional farming’s negative impact on the land and enhance the farm ecosystem, while ensuring the people involved are thriving. This agricultural revolution takes time and must be lasting, requiring more capital to address inequitable wealth distribution. Mad Agriculture engages with essential questions: What does the land need? How can agroecosystems be designed to honor people and place? And how can those caring for the land be ensured access to the resources they need?

With these questions in mind, the Cisco Foundation has funded Mad Agriculture’s work with farmers across the U.S., beginning the focus predominately in the Intermountain West, Great Plains, Midwest, and Southeast. Through the Regenerative Catalyst Fund, Mad Agriculture helps farmers move from planning to action, offering small grants, 0% loans, cost-sharing opportunities, and other innovative financing models. In 2024, $500,000 was provided to over 30 farmers for regenerative practices such as prairie strips, perennial plantings (including trees, hedgerows, pollinator habitats, and silvopasture), and fencing for holistic grazing. In addition to ecological expertise, Mad Agriculture brings business acumen to support farmers in their full complexity, including enabling irrigation systems, agrotourism, and winning larger grants.

myAgro — Designing mobile tools that connect farmers in West Africa with climate-smart solutions

myAgro is a nonprofit social enterprise that helps smallholder farmers in West Africa move out of poverty. With myAgro’s mobile layaway platform, farmers make small payments towards climate-smart packages of seeds, fertilizer, and regenerative agriculture training that increase soil health, yields, and income — boosting climate resilience. In 2023, myAgro reported their farmers grew 179% more food and earned US$164 more than control farmers.

Central to myAgro’s model are Village Entrepreneurs (VEs) — local sales ambassadors (primarily women) who help farmers enroll for packages and make payments. Initially VEs used paper ledgers to manage sales, but they eventually needed digital tools to serve a growing number of farmers in their communities. With support from the Cisco Foundation, myAgro developed the Connect mobile app, enabling VEs to manage sales, enroll farmers, and collect payments digitally. Since then, myAgro has upgraded the app with support from Cisco to generate customer target lists, facilitate mobile money payments, and make year-round package sales among other key features.

Ultimately, Connect has enabled VEs to link exponentially more farmers with the tools they need to increase their income through regenerative agriculture. In 2024, myAgro is on track to serve more than 280,000 farmers in Mali, Senegal, and Cóte d’Ivoire.

“I was drawn to myAgro’s holistic approach towards farming, which emphasized the importance of sustainable techniques and access to quality inputs. Through myAgro’s training programs, I gained valuable insights into soil management, seed selection, and crop rotation, which have been instrumental in optimizing my farm’s productivity.” – Mercedes Coly, myAgro Farmer in Senegal

Miraterra: A completely new way to look at soil

Miraterra is transforming measurement in the food system starting with soil. With 95% of food grown in soil, improving soil health and halting degradation is crucial for our food system. Regenerative agriculture practices build healthier, more resilient soil, yielding nutrient-rich plants and food. However, a comprehensive measurement system has been lacking. Miraterra, supported in part by a direct investment from the Cisco Foundation impact investing portfolio, is filling this gap by developing technology that analyzes unprocessed soil, providing accurate, affordable, and repeatable soil measurement not achieved by conventional methods, enhancing confidence and integrity at scale.

Their technology quantifies the benefits of practices such as cover cropping, reduced tillage, and residue detection at the end of the harvest season. These methods improve soil health, increase farm profitability and carbon sequestration, while reducing environmental impact.

Collaborating with agricultural testing laboratories across North America, Miraterra helps growers and agronomists quantify and support healthy land practices. They are also developing AI-powered tools to correlate land practices with food nutrition and enable growers to interact with a living record of their land. By providing accurate, affordable, and rapid soil analysis, Miraterra empowers farmers to make informed decisions about soil management, ultimately contributing to improved soil health and increased carbon sequestration.

Cisco and the Cisco Foundation take a holistic approach to addressing environmental and social issues. Communities that can adapt to a changing climate have the right skills, infrastructure and economic foundation to build resilient communities that can better withstand the consequences of climate change.

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THE WOODLANDS, Texas, October 23, 2024 /3BL/ – Entergy Texas has been awarded nearly $54 million in federal funding to improve power grid resilience in Port Arthur’s Pear Ridge, Kolbs, and Lakeview neighborhoods. This funding will go toward a resiliency project aimed to help lessen the impact of future extreme weather events in this coastal community. Once completed, the project is designed to reduce outage durations, restoration costs, damage to utility infrastructure, and accelerate recovery after major storms.

The funding comes from the Department of Energy’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program, established by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The GRIP program supports projects that make the power grid more flexible and resilient against climate change and the growing threats of extreme weather. This award will match Entergy Texas’ investment on the project with $53.75 million dollars in federal funding.

“By securing this federal funding, we’re helping to keep bills affordable for our customers and building a stronger grid that they can count on,” said Entergy Texas President and CEO Eliecer Viamontes. “Despite not being selected for this award last year, we listened to the feedback, improved our approach, and tried again—because that’s what our customers deserve. This project will benefit not just Port Arthur but the entire Southeast Texas community, reinforcing the Gulf Coast as a key economic hub and improving service for thousands of homes and businesses.”

Benefits of Entergy Texas’ Port Arthur resilience project include:

Increased resilience: Improving service resilience for approximately 7,000 homes and businesses by:Upgrading or burying 950 distribution structures;Reinforcing 57 transmission structures;Installing 14 devices to allow faster response to power outages; andAdding a self-healing microgrid with a large battery to manage short-term outages.Faster recovery: Reducing the time customers are without power after storms by approximately 257 million minutes over the next 50 years.Cost savings: Lowering storm recovery costs, saving an estimated $74 million over the next 50 years.Community support: Creating job and training opportunities for residents of disadvantaged Census areas.

“As extreme weather events continue to stress electric systems across the country, the Biden-Harris Administration is using every tool in the toolbox to make sure America’s power grid can provide reliable, affordable power,” said Maria Robinson, Director of DOE’s Grid Deployment Office. “By fortifying critical infrastructure in both distribution and transmission systems to withstand extreme weather events, Entergy Texas will advance a critical step in maintaining reliable power in Port Arthur, a community that has endured some of the country’s most historic weather events.”

Texas and the Gulf Coast have faced several powerful storms this year alone, including Hurricanes Beryl, Francine, Helene, and Milton. These storms and other extreme weather events in recent years highlight the urgent need to strengthen our power systems.

Entergy Texas’ Port Arthur resilience project also addresses the critical need to improve infrastructure in areas hit hardest by both extreme weather and social and economic challenges. More than 94% of Port Arthur residents live in federally recognized disadvantaged areas. This project will help ensure that improvements to the grid are fairly distributed, giving these communities fair access to more reliable and affordable energy.

“As a city that has faced the repeated devastation of extreme weather, this project comes at a crucial time for Port Arthur,” said Port Arthur Mayor Thurman Bartie. “This funding will provide a critical boost to our infrastructure, ensuring that our residents and businesses are better protected before, during, and after extreme weather events. We’re grateful to Entergy Texas and the Department of Energy for their continued support in making Port Arthur a stronger, more resilient place to live and work.”

As part of this project, Entergy Texas has also developed a multi-phased community benefits plan, which includes the creation of a Community Benefits Working Group made up of community partners. The working group will build on the company’s existing programs and relationships to deliver additional benefits to the Port Arthur community, such as labor engagement, education and job training programs, and financial services to low-income families through partnerships with social services organizations.

“Our goal is to improve lives and uplift the communities we serve,” said Viamontes.

Learn more about Entergy Texas’ continued commitment to building a brighter future for Southeast Texas.

About Entergy Texas

Entergy Texas, Inc. provides electricity to approximately 512,000 customers in 27 counties. Entergy Texas is a subsidiary of Entergy Corporation, a Fortune 500 electric company. Entergy powers life for 3 million customers through its operating companies in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. We’re investing in the reliability and resilience of the energy system while helping our region transition to cleaner, more efficient energy solutions. With roots in our communities for more than 100 years, Entergy is a nationally recognized leader in sustainability and corporate citizenship. Since 2018, we have delivered more than $100 million in economic benefits each year to local communities through philanthropy, volunteerism and advocacy. Entergy is headquartered in New Orleans, Louisiana, and has approximately 12,000 employees. For the latest news from Entergy Texas, visit the Newsroom and connect with @EntergyTX on social media.

FARMINGTON, Conn., October 23, 2024 /3BL/ – Otis strives to be a world-class employer where colleagues work together to create new ideas and opportunities to best serve customers and passengers. In its annual survey of workers across industries and around the world, Forbes Magazine again has ranked Otis Worldwide Corporation (NYSE: OTIS) as one of the World’s Best Employers.

The prestigious list is based on the opinions of colleagues around the world who provided feedback. Companies named to the list are those that respondents said prioritize well-being, promote inclusivity, offer growth opportunities, and ensure a healthy work-life balance.

“At Otis, we take great pride in supporting our colleagues to build what’s next – in their careers and in our industry. It’s an honor to be recognized by Forbes, and placement on this list for consecutive years validates our strategy and programming in support of our 71,000 colleagues around the globe,” said Otis Chief People Officer Abbe Luersman.

More than 300,000 professionals across 50 countries and territories working for multinational companies were asked to rate their willingness to recommend their employers to friends and family. They were also asked to think about other employers in their industries that stand out because of something positive or negative. Each survey was anonymous.

Otis is one of 850 companies that scored the highest on the survey and are featured on the worldwide list this year.

About Otis

Otis gives people freedom to connect and thrive in a taller, faster, smarter world. The global leader in the manufacture, installation and servicing of elevators and escalators, we move 2.3 billion people a day and maintain approximately 2.3 million customer units worldwide – the industry’s largest Service portfolio. You’ll find us in the world’s most iconic structures, as well as residential and commercial buildings, transportation hubs and everywhere people are on the move. Headquartered in Connecticut, USA, Otis is 71,000 people strong, including 42,000 field professionals, all committed to meeting the diverse needs of our customers and passengers in more than 200 countries and territories. To learn more, visit www.otis.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook @OtisElevatorCo.

Forbes is a registered trademark of Forbes LLC

As previously seen on the CSRHub blog. 

Richmond Global Sciences (RGS) seeks to provide comprehensive tech solutions for key stakeholders committed to making a positive impact on the Environment and Society while generating Financial Returns. It provides impact analysis and financial data insight to public, private, and fixed income investors.

CSRHub is now integrating this data into its consensus Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings system. Unlike other ratings sources, RGS does not seek to fit companies into a curve (best to worst, with a bulge in the middle). Instead, it estimates the financial impact that a company has on society through its greenhouse gas emissions, waste, data breaches, hiring, and other ESG-related issues.

RGS’s unique approach created some challenges when we first sought to integrate its data into our system. The chart below shows that only 11% of the companies studied were “bad actors” on impact and only 1% were “super bad.”

These results are not ‘traditional’ ESG scores, but rather show how much positive or negative impact a company has if all their impacts were accounted for and priced as $ of impact for every $ of revenue generated. That would in essence mean that any companies with lower than a -$1 would be unprofitable if all of their negative impacts were to be priced in.

See Total Impact/$ of Revenue Reveals Several Interesting Features graph.

Fortunately, we have seen other absolute measures such as those Richmond Global provides. For instance, most carbon and pollutant emission sources have similar long tails. After processing through our normalization engine, we got F Scores between 5 and 11 for signals that affect our environment and social ratings. (An F score above 2 suggests at least a 95% chance that two signals are related.)

All of the entities RGS shared data for were already in CSRHub’s rating system. (You can see a list of the RGS-covered entities here). This means that those who want to pair impact with CSRHub’s outside-in consensus signal can now do so. RGS covers most of the world’s largest entities. About half of the entities RGS has data for are from North America.

We expect to soon offer sets of impact estimates from RGS within CSRHub’s ESG Roadmap report. This will allow companies to quickly compare their impact on society against that of selected groups of their peers. Please contact us if you’d like to be one of the first testers of this new feature.

 

Bahar Gidwani is CTO and Co-founder of CSRHub.  He has built and run large technology-based businesses for many years. Bahar holds a CFA, worked on Wall Street with Kidder, Peabody, and with McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to a number of major companies and currently serves on the board of several software and Web companies. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy. He plays bridge, races sailboats, and is based in New York City.

About CSRHub

CSRHub offers the most comprehensive global set of Consensus ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) ratings, information, and tools. CSRHub’s business intelligence system measures the ESG business impact that drives corporate and investor sustainability decisions. Founded in 2007, CSRHub covers 55,000 public and private companies, and provides ESG performance scores on over 35,000 companies from 135 industries in 210 countries. Our Big Data platform uses algorithms to aggregate, normalize and weight ESG metrics from 933 sources to produce a strong consensus signal on corporate sustainability performance.

The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) represents a significant shift in sustainability reporting. As part of the EU Green Deal, it emphasizes the importance of transparency and accountability in corporate activities. A key component of this directive is the Double Materiality Assessment (DMA). CSRD companies are required to evaluate their sustainability matters from two distinct perspectives: financial materiality and impact materiality.

The CSRD mandates that companies independently assess whether a sustainability matter is material from a financial or impact perspective—or both. A matter is considered material if it requires disclosure from just one of these perspectives. This dual approach adds complexity to materiality assessments but also ensures a more comprehensive and fact-based understanding of a company’s sustainability footprint.

Data Quality in Double Materiality Assessments 

During these first few years of CSRD reporting, DMAs are often conducted with estimates based on the “best possible information” proxy data, generic data models, indirect stakeholder feedback, and publicly available scientific research. The availability of actual products and site-specific data is often limited. Although these estimations and limitations are expected now, future DMAs will require businesses to develop their data. By coordination and stakeholder communication, more accurate, recent, and specific data may need to be produced to achieve better performance and realize competitive advantage.

The Path Forward: Improving Data Quality and Stakeholder Communication 

The CSRD has put into motion a need to genuinely connect businesses, not only within the organization but across its value chain. As business systems mature, the quality of sustainability-related information will probably increase. Data standardization will enable businesses to report consistent metrics at the site level, leading to richer KPIs and increased visibility of progress.

Value chain partner communication will also need to mature to keep up with CSRD demands. Businesses are increasingly being expected to understand, not estimate or model where raw materials come from, how that material enters their supply chain, and what are the impacts to the people and communities along the way.

The Key to More Accurate Sustainability Reporting 

To effectively conduct a DMA, companies must move beyond merely estimating impacts. They will need to adopt a granular approach that includes compiling and coordinating site-level assessments to directly measure sustainability impacts. This involves a detailed analysis of operations at each site, considering local environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, and aligning them with broader corporate sustainability goals.

The transition to this level of detail in sustainability reporting is challenging but necessary. It allows for a more accurate and actionable understanding of a company’s sustainability impacts and the risks and opportunities associated with them. By doing so, companies can not only comply with the CSRD but also demonstrate their commitment to sustainable practices to stakeholders and society at large.

Additional Resources 

For further information on conducting a DMA in line with the CSRD, resources such as the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group’s (EFRAG) recently published Materiality Assessment Implementation Guidance (MAIG) and Value Chain Implementation Guidance (VCIG) provide considerations and insights into this complex undertaking. These resources provide detailed instructions and considerations that can help companies navigate the complexities of double materiality and enhance the quality of their sustainability reporting.

Conclusion: The Future of Double Materiality and Sustainability Reporting 

The transition to comprehensive sustainability reporting through Double Materiality Assessments presents both challenges and opportunities for businesses. While the complexity of data collection and the current reliance on proxy information may seem daunting, the future demands more accuracy, transparency, and collaboration across the value chain. By embracing these changes, companies can not only meet the evolving regulatory requirements under the CSRD but also position themselves as leaders in sustainability.

As businesses enhance their data collection practices and strengthen communication with stakeholders, they will be better equipped to provide meaningful insights into their sustainability efforts. This, in turn, will build trust with stakeholders and create a competitive advantage in a marketplace increasingly focused on sustainability. With the right tools, resources, and mindset, companies can rise to the challenge and contribute to a more sustainable future.

Do you have questions? Reach out to our team of experts today!

Healthcare plastic waste is a growing concern. While a significant portion is non-hazardous and recyclable, most ends up in landfills or incinerators. A new HPRC case study examines the experiences of four European hospitals pioneering plastic recycling programs. These hospitals are making strides, but face challenges like:

Sorting at the point of use: This is considered most effective but strains busy staff.Mixed-material items and low waste volumes: These factors complicate recycling efforts.Limited financial incentive: Currently, hospitals often pay to recycle or receive little financial benefit.

Despite these hurdles, the hospitals in our study demonstrate a strong commitment to environmental responsibility. They are open to collaboration and exploring solutions like:

Clearer labeling: Simplifying what can be recycled.Dedicated waste management spaces: Easing the burden on staff.New business models: Making recycling more economically viable for hospitals.

Learn more about the specific challenges and promising solutions in our full case study! Download it today and see how your hospital can join the movement towards a more sustainable future.

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