Making Sustainability Matter

Book excerpt: Materiality is the lynch-pin that can align your sustainability initiatives with your organizational strategy – and form the basis of communications and reports that generate trust and transparency. What's more, most companies could be significantly more profitable by engaging with their most material sustainability issues. Making Sustainability Matter, by business strategy expert Dwayne Baraka, draws lessons from the author's work with a wide range of organizations, including several of the FTSE 100, financial services, housing associations and technology companies. It will show you how to: identify your organization's most material sustainability issues, and use a well thought out materiality process to integrate sustainability into your organization; allocate resources to sustainability initiatives for optimal returns – and avoid wasting resources on programmes that are not strategically aligned to your business; connect your communications to materiality, and; clarify which issues are important to your stakeholders. Case studies from SAP and Marks and Spencer are included along with appendices on common material sustainability issues, sustainability issues record and further resources.