Better sustainability decisions through Impact Assessments

A success story of dormakaba
The original article by Stephanie Ossenbach, Manager Sustainability Communication at dormakaba, was published on sustainablebrands.com. Please find on the right-hand side the pdf-article about the project as publish in the December 2018 edition of the CSR Magazin (only available in German).At dormaka, we aim to become the trusted industry leader and to make access in life smart and secure. We also want to be smart about the choices we make as a company — including how we manage sustainability. That is why we decided to conduct a sustainability impact assessment of our business activities. Our goal is to responsibly manage our business, focusing our sustainability efforts where we can have the most impact. Assessing business impacts on sustainable development has gained momentum in recent years. In 2016, RobecoSAM included impact valuation in its Corporate Sustainability Assessment questionnaire, which builds the basis of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. The EU Directive on non-financial reporting requires the disclosure of a business’s impacts on society. Last but not least, the GRI Standards have clarified the inside-out nature of the term ‘impacts’ in its materiality definition. These developments emphasize the importance of considering the impacts of business activities on the environment and society. How to assess impacts Evaluating, measuring and comparing different risks and impacts across different topics is complex. The field of impact assessments and natural capital accounting is in its early stages. Nevertheless, various projects demonstrate that it is possible to properly quantify and evaluate such impacts (e.g. BASF or Kering). The challenge is that this work can often be very time and resource consuming, with most methods focusing only on environmental issues. Our goal, then, was to gain a better understanding of our environmental, social and economic impacts for our materiality assessment, without having to conduct an extensive quantitative analysis. We wanted a pragmatic, yet solid approach — one we found with the study-based impact assessment methodology of global sustainability consultancy BSD Consulting. BSD’s approach provides for a structured qualitative analysis of environmental, social and economic indicators for the countries and industries dormakaba is involved in throughout our value chain (see diagram below).

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