ESG in Practice

Issuers are required to outline the process and criteria adopted to identify material ESG issues under the ESG Reporting Guide. The TCFD recommendations also recommend describing the processes for identifying and assessing climate-related risks (under the “Risk management” pillar). The ESG report should describe clearly the process on how ESG risks are identified and determined to have a material impact on the issuer and its business. A proper disclosure of materiality assessment should reveal the criteria for prioritisation and evaluation method adopted. Where the issuer has considered publicly available standards/guidelines during the process, these standards/guidelines may be cited to facilitate stakeholders' understanding of the assessment process.

A materiality matrix is commonly used to reflect results of a materiality assessment in an easy to understand format. While a materiality matrix usually shows the impacts of an ESG issue on an issuer's business (value of x-axis) against that on the issuer's stakeholders (value of y-axis), issuers may also use different values for the axes based on their areas of concern. Where numerous ESG issues are plotted on the matrix, it would also be helpful to group issues into sub-topics (e.g. environmental, social) so that stakeholders may have an overall picture on the relative impact of different ESG aspects on the issuer.