Sustainability Impacts, Risks & Opportunities Assessment

Why assessing your sustainability Impacts, Risks and Opportunities matters

As sustainability regulations evolve and stakeholder expectations grow, understanding your sustainability impacts, risks, and opportunities (IROs) is more important than ever. Taking a structured approach to identifying IROs helps businesses stay on top of non-financial factors that can impact future business prosperity. For example, this could mean addressing climate-related risks that may disrupt supply chains or seizing opportunities to increase the share of recycled content in products to meet market demand.

Our IRO assessment services

At Ecomatters, we have experience in several sustainability assessment methodologies which help businesses identify their material IROs. A material IRO is an impact, risk, or opportunity that is significant or important enough to influence business decisions. The three assessment methodologies we follow are:

1. Double Materiality Assessment for CSRD compliance

A Double Materiality Assessment (DMA) identifies a business’s material IROs from two perspectives:

Inside Looking Out – These are the impacts a business has on environmental, social, and governance issues
Outside Looking In – These are external sustainability influences that affect a business’s financial performance

Once complete, a DMA provides valuable insight into internal and external stakeholder opinions on sustainability matters and a company’s sustainability impacts. Read our DMA case study to understand more about the assessment process.

2. Voluntary streamlined materiality assessment (VSME)

A VSME is a simplified, voluntary assessment that helps businesses quickly gain insight into their most relevant environmental, social and governance topics. This then helps businesses to align their sustainability efforts with their strategic priorities.

3. Sustainability Risk Assessment

Industries like chemicals, plastics, and manufacturing face increasing sustainability risks, such as increased frequency of extreme weather events impacting raw material extraction, shifting demand patterns favouring repairable products, and changing consumer and regulator perceptions around the environmental fate of products. At Ecomatters, we perform sustainability risk assessments to help businesses identify their climate-related risks and dependencies, and develop strategies to mitigate these risks and take opportunities.