The article outlines three steps for businesses to determine material information. Credit: Tiko Aramyan/Shutterstock.

The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) has launched a new instalment in its sustainability reporting series – Sustainability Reporting: Risk and Materiality.聽聽

The series offers guidance on helping businesses identify material information for sustainability reporting and outlines three steps.聽It also emphasises the importance of addressing both physical and transitional climate-related risks, highlighting their impact on business continuity.聽

These encompass identifying sustainability-related risks and opportunities (SRROs), assessing their potential impact on the organisation, and determining the relevant information for disclosure.  

These steps are supplemented with real-life examples to inspire accountants, finance professionals, and business leaders to improve their approaches to risk and opportunity communication.聽聽

It also details strategies that include managing and mitigating these risks while adapting to take advantage of emerging opportunities in sustainability. 

Organisations are encouraged to take a holistic approach to creating and communicating material information about their SRROs, according to the series. 

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The series stresses that businesses should allocate resources to begin identifying SRROs, both from the resources and relationships in their value chains and those that their activities could affect. 

This guidance is expected to help businesses provide the most relevant sustainability-related information possible and enhance the reporting process in future cycles.  

Businesses are encouraged to leverage the knowledge gained from one reporting cycle to improve the communication of material information in the next.聽

ACCA financial corporate reporting insights head Aaron Saw said: 鈥淢any organisations have siloed management and reporting of financial and sustainability-related matters. As a result, they don鈥檛 realise they already have access to insights they need for reporting.  

鈥淭o streamline cost and effort and to produce connected information, it makes sense to leverage existing risk-management processes to identify and manage sustainability-related risks and opportunities.鈥� 

This launch follows the release of the ACCA’s pass rates for its December exam session of 2024.  

A total of 113,910 candidates entered the December session, completing 130,898 exams. Of these, 4,734 students successfully passed all their exams, achieving affiliate status.