Navigating the Sustainability Reporting landscape – Method Specification and tool for Materiality Assessment

Abstract

This work delves into the pain points encountered in the current industry practices for conducting materiality assessment, and aims to improve the process by reducing effort and subjectivity involved therein. The work consists of a method specification based on a case study. A part of the envisioned solution is implemented by creating a tool to automate parts of the process. Apart from reducing effort and subjectivity, the proposed solution incorporates weightage-schemes in creation of term document matrix, where the previous process considered only occurrences. The tool is validated to favorable outcomes from practitioners and researchers, with respect to being a valid solution and potential commercial implementation. The automation achieves to reduce the effort to less than 2% of the original. Future work in this line of research is improving the precision and recall parameters, social media sentiment analysis, and a learning module to further streamline and perfect the tool-output.