Getting More Value From Your Double Materiality Assessment

How a DMA can strengthen reporting, integrate risk, and bridge CSRD and ISSB

winter forest

Principal Consultant

UK

Director

UK

A double materiality assessment (DMA) should deliver far more than a list of material topics. Done well, it becomes a powerful decision-making tool to shape reporting, strengthen risk management and help organisations navigate an increasingly complex sustainability landscape. 

1. Bring credibility and focus to sustainability reporting

Sustainability reporting has earned itself a reputation for sitting at the heart of an ever-growing ‘acronym soup’. Between CSRD, ISSB, TCFD, EUDR (and the list goes on), it can be difficult for organisations to know where to focus and what really matters.

A well-designed DMA cuts through the noise.

As part of the assessment, organisations should step back and consider their external environment and look at the regulations they already comply with, those coming down the line and the expectations of key stakeholders and users of sustainability information. This context should directly inform how sustainability-related impacts, risks and opportunities (IROs) are identified and refined.

Crucially, materiality should be front-of-mind from the very beginning. When identifying a longlist of IROs, this is not about capturing everything. Business-as-usual activities should remain off the list. Instead, organisations should be asking:

  • Where are the key hotspots in the value chain?
  • Who are the most affected stakeholders and what are the most significant impacts on them?
  • What information is genuinely decision-useful for users?
  • Where are IROs already embedded in the business model and strategy?

Taking this more intentional approach provides structure and focus early on. It also means organisations come out of the DMA with a clear, defensible view of what needs to be reported, which is grounded in business relevance and realistic in terms of future management and data availability.

Is Your Double Materiality Assessment Delivering Real Value?

Join Anthesis for a practical and insightful webinar on the Double Materiality Assessment (DMA), covering what’s changed since the first wave of CSRD reports, what high-quality looks like, and how to use your DMA as more than a compliance exercise.

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2. Aligning sustainability and risk management

One of the most common pain points we hear is: “We’ve done our DMA, but how do we integrate it into our Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) processes?”.

A DMA creates a natural opportunity to bring sustainability and risk closer together, often for the first time in a structured way. In our experience, some practical ways to do this include:

  • Engage risk and finance teams early. Ideally, a risk or finance colleague should be part of the core DMA project team, actively contributing to day-to-day decisions rather than reviewing outcomes at the end.  
  • Leverage existing risk documentation. Risk registers are a valuable starting point for building the sustainability risk longlist.
  • Use your ERM framework (if available) to score risks and opportunities. Where possible, existing scoring methodologies and thresholds should be applied to sustainability risks (and adapted appropriately for opportunities). Increasingly,  auditors are asking whether organisations have used their ERM framework as part of the DMA.
  • Test consistency and accuracy. Risk and finance colleagues should review the longlist of risks and opportunities to ensure alignment with existing risk language, assumptions and financial narratives.
  • Create clear links back to principal risks. Once material risks are confirmed, existing risk registers or principal risk disclosures should be updated to reflect these connections.
  • Assign ownerships and controls. DMA outputs can be used as a stepping stone towards assigning risk owners and identifying existing or required controls.

Approached in this way, the DMA stops being a standalone compliance exercise and instead becomes a catalyst for more integrated, joined-up risk management.

3. Using your DMA to meet both CSRD and ISSB requirements

This year has been pivotal for the global adoption of ISSB standards. For organisations that either fall under both CSRD and ISSB, or expect to in the future, now is an ideal moment to ensure that DMA approaches work for both.

The key materiality difference between CSRD & ISSB

  • CSRD requires a double materiality, covering both impact materiality and financial materiality
  • ISSB focuses on financial materiality only

Many organisations are now grappling with how to meet both sets of expectations without duplicating effort. A robust DMA provides a strong foundation for doing exactly that.

To ensure your DMA is suitable for ISSB as well as CSRD, key considerations include:

  • Ground the assessment in existing financial and risk information. This includes ERM framework, risk registers, budgets and forecasts, investor requests, climate risk assessments, and scenario analysis.
  • Use the DMA to engage primary users of information. Where organisations lack regular investor user engagement, the DMA offers a valuable opportunity to ask which sustainability issues are influencing decisions and how these are expected to affect financial performance.
  • Keep impacts separate from risks and opportunities. They are assessed and scored differently, and aligning risk and opportunity scoring with ERM processes supports ISSB readiness.
  • Ensure risks and opportunities are sufficiently detailed. Good practise includes capturing drivers (e.g., physical, regulatory, market), time horizons, affected business areas, and potential financial effects (such as revenues, costs or access to capital).
  • Clearly articulate the financial rationale. Final DMA outputs should present material risks and opportunities, with a transparent basis for concluding why each is expected to affect cash flows/ access to finance/ cost of capital.

Turning insight into value

Ultimately, materiality should be a cornerstone of strategy, pointing to hotspots for action and innovation, but many assessments today stop well short of unlocking that kind of insight.  If you have already completed a DMA but are unsure whether it’s delivering value beyond compliance, Anthesis offers a complimentary DMA Value Check. This helps to assess whether your DMA is truly supporting reporting, risk integration and strategy decision making, and where additional value could be unlocked.

We’ll also be exploring these topics in more depth during our upcoming webinar on 27th May. If you would like to join us, sign up here.

Claim your complimentary DMA Value Check. We review your current DMA to assess how well it supports reporting, risk integration and strategic decision-making—identifying gaps and opportunities for greater impact.

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