top of page
Search

From Risk to Reward: Making Double Materiality Work for You

ree

In today's business landscape, navigating climate impact is no longer a nice-to-have, it's a strategic must-have. With evolving regulations such as the EU CSRD, ISSB Standards, and the upcoming UK Sustainability Disclosure Standards (UK SDS), companies must go beyond surface-level ESG commitments.

At the heart of this evolution lies a powerful concept that helps navigate risks: double materiality.

What Is Double Materiality and Why Does It Matter?

Double materiality asks two key questions: How do environmental and social factors affect your company’s financial performance? And how does your business impact the environment and society in delivering those results? These are known as the two lenses of double materiality:

  • Outside-In (Financial Materiality): Identify which external ESG issues pose financial risks or opportunities to your business.

  • Inside-Out (Impact Materiality): Assess how your business activities affect society and the environment across your entire value chain.

This two-way lens shifts materiality from a compliance exercise into a strategic tool, connecting impact, risk, and opportunity in a way that drives long-term value creation.


Double Materiality
Double Materiality

This two-way lens shifts materiality from a compliance exercise into a strategic tool, connecting impact, risk, and opportunity in a way that drives long-term value creation.

Why Materiality Assessments Are Now Essential

Double Materiality is no longer just a box-ticking exercise. A robust double materiality assessment plays a vital role in aligning sustainability with your overall business strategy. It supports compliance with evolving regulatory requirements like CSRD, ISSB, and UK SDS, and strengthens your approach to risk management. But it also goes beyond compliance, unlocking innovation, improving operational efficiency, and building lasting trust with stakeholders and investors.

However, despite its growing importance, materiality assessments can be complex and time-consuming. Companies often spend months gathering data, engaging stakeholders, and aligning their findings with corporate strategies. This lengthy process can lead to misalignment with evolving priorities and missed opportunities.

A typical assessment involves:

  • Understanding your company’s baseline (industry, footprint, operations)

  • Mapping applicable sustainability regulations

  • Engaging stakeholders

  • Prioritising material topics

  • Aligning governance and decision-making processes

By embracing double materiality, organisations can future-proof their strategies while creating meaningful impact.

A Smarter Way Forward: Introducing G17Eco’s Materiality Tracker

To simplify and streamline the process of double materiality assessments, we created Materiality Tracker, a digital tool designed to make assessments fast, accurate, and repeatable.

Fully aligned with CSRD, ISSB, and UK SDS, the platform offers a ‘robo-adviser’-style interface for intuitive navigation and delivers data-driven insights from over 350 data points across more than 190 countries. With trillions of scenario combinations, it generates tailored recommendations backed by objective scoring that eliminates bias and enhances credibility.

Traditional assessments are often manual, time-consuming, expensive, and hard to update consistently. Where companies typically spend up to 12 months completing assessments, Materiality Tracker enables businesses of all sizes to complete robust, defensible assessments in just 12 days, saving you months of effort and resources.

The tool also includes built-in stakeholder engagement features, helping you achieve significant time and cost savings compared to traditional manual consultancy approaches.


Climate risk is business risk. Are you measuring what matters?

Regulatory demands are tightening, with governments around the world introducing more stringent laws on sustainability reporting and practices. Stakeholder expectations are growing too, as investors, customers, and employees increasingly demand transparency and accountability from businesses on their impact. At the same time, the risks of inaction, reputational, financial, and operational are escalating. Failing to address climate and sustainability issues can lead to lost market share, rising costs, and a damaged reputation, making it critical to act now.

Double materiality gives you a clearer lens to see where you stand, and where to go next. G17Eco’s Materiality Tracker makes that journey easier, faster, and more insightful.

bottom of page