Materiality Assessment
The double materiality assessment is a critical strategic decision making tool to identify and prioritize key sustainability matters. The DMA approach facilitates the inclusion of sustainability issues from two perspectives:
- Financial materiality, which addresses sustainability-related issues that impact company value such as profitability and cash flow.
- Impact materiality includes a company’s impacts on the environment and society, such as carbon emissions, workforce diversity, and human rights.
OUR APPROACH
Our DMA approach involved the following steps:
- Identified relevant sustainability matters across our business context.
- Engaged with stakeholders to identify and assess impacts, risks, and opportunities (IROs).
- Mapped material IROs to ESRS disclosure requirements.
The material topics identified through this process include:
and Ecosystems
Circular Economy
the Value Chain
RESULTS
The matrix summarizes the outcome of the assessment. Given that we rely heavily on natural resources and have diversified business activities primarily in industrial manufacturing, most high-level ESRS topics were deemed material to report. We acknowledge our unique responsibility to operate sustainably and embed these principles along our value chain.
The topics that are material from both an impact and financial perspective are E1 Climate Change, E5 Resource Use and Circular Economy, and E4 Biodiversity and Ecosystems primarily because our business model and strategy rely heavily on the availability of wood fiber and healthy forests which inherently intersect with potential impacts to the environment. S1 Own Workforce was also deemed material from both perspectives as our business relies on the retention of a strong, skilled workforce while our employees’ well-being is directly impacted by our business decisions.
This double materiality assessment helped to inform our 2024 reporting and sustainability strategy, however, given that Mercer is not yet required to comply with CSRD, additional topics and details have been included in this 2024 report.
DOUBLE MATERIALITY ASSESSMENT
