ESG disclosure & reporting7 min read

From a double materiality assessment to indicators that run

The assessment arrives as a deck and a spreadsheet. Thirty or forty topics, each rated on impact and on financial consequence, an impacts, risks and opportunities register behind them, and a matrix with a diagonal line across it. It is careful work, it has been through a steering committee, and somebody has signed it.

Then it goes to the person who has to make the system produce numbers, and the questions start immediately. In what unit, collected by whom, how often, and from which source document. Against what boundary, converted with which factor, and whose version of that factor.

None of those questions were the assessment's job. That is the gap this article is about, and it is wider than most implementation plans allow for, because it is not a documentation gap. It is a set of unmade decisions that the platform will force you to make one at a time, usually while somebody is waiting.