Environmental, Social and Governance

Corps Act s.180 states that a director or other officer of a corporation must exercise their powers and discharge their duties with a degree of care and diligence. The increase in mandated reporting on ESG issues, such as climate-related financial disclosures and modern slavery reporting, suggest that ESG matters are now part of the board’s fiduciary duty landscape. Directors may also be liable for ‘greenwashing’ disclosures if such disclosures are not underpinned by proper information, governance processes, strategy or action. 

We can help your organisation review its ESG governance structure, brief your board on the latest developments in director duties and responsibilities in relation to ESG, and assist your organisation’s management of the integration of ESG material issues into corporate strategy, risk management, financial performance evaluation and reporting. 

An ESG materiality assessment is a good start to better understand stakeholder expectations, identify material ESG issues, risks & opportunities, and then to manage and report on them. 

Our services include stakeholder mapping, stakeholder engagement & consultation, ESG topic scoring and prioritisation, as well as embedding ESG priority topics into the organisation’s risk management framework and strategic & business planning processes. 

The most critical part of a materiality assessment is stakeholder engagement and consultation. This is generally done through a combination of both direct engagement such as workshops and one-to-one interviews, as well as indirect consultation such as surveys. After we obtain opinions from key stakeholders on the most significant ESG issues, each ESG topic is assessed and scored using a materiality matrix under the ‘double materiality principle’. We then recommend the material ESG topics for the organisation. 

To help organisations keep pace with stakeholder expectations, create and preserve enterprise value and enhance impacts are at the core of our services.  

We help organisations link the ESG risks and opportunities identified from the above processes to its financial performance and enterprise valuation, which includes assessing impacts on the organisation’s revenue and costs, assets and liabilities, and cost of capital. 

Over the past few years, we have seen an increase in the demand of sustainability information from investors and other stakeholders. As part of our ESG Reporting and Disclosure services, we can help organisations find the sustainability standards or frameworks suitable to them for public reporting and disclosure. 

We also provide support to the organisation’s reporting processes, from advising on governance such as board’s roles, to the design and implementation of control procedures to improve data quality.