Prioritise

Position Database

Is your company interested in taking a public position on an ESG issue?

To help companies develop strong, clear positions, we will maintain a public database containing leading positions articulated by large companies globally. 

Our governance guide outlines how companies should articulate their positions, and we have applied this criteria to the positions featured in this database.

Developing Position Statements on Sustainability Issues

There is growing pressure among companies to link social and environmental limits to corporate strategy and goal-setting. However, the result is often a lengthy document that fails to make strategic connections between specific issues and their implications on business decision-making. We developed this guidebook to help you articulate a concise and transparent board level position on key environmental, social, and governance issues. Drawing upon in-depth analyses of over 4,000 board position statements; over 200 interviews with CEOs, directors, and board chairs; and concepts outlined in our series on the Road to Context, this guidebook provides a checklist for crafting a contextual board position statement and includes examples from a range of industries and global settings.

Emerging Trends and Best Practice in Climate Position Statements

Climate change is happening, and the impacts are intensifying. Companies are expected to take a position on climate change and outline an appropriate response. The Embedding Project’s climate position guide helps companies to articulate a concise and transparent board level position on climate change. Drawing on in-depth analyses of over 2,600 climate position statements, this guidebook provides a checklist for crafting a climate position statement with concrete examples from a range of industries and global settings. 

Taking a Credible Position on Nature

There is growing pressure on companies to publicly acknowledge the unprecedented nature loss we face, and what they plan to do to address it. To help them do so, we reviewed over 1,000 statements on nature loss, biodiversity, and ecosystem stewardship from a wide range of geographies and industries, and identified examples of how companies are explaining the issue of nature loss, linking the issue of nature loss to their strategy, and clarifying their commitments to protect and restore nature. We hope this guide is helpful to you in articulating your own credible position statement on protecting and restoring nature.

Embedded Strategies for the Sustainability Transition

It is time for companies to take a very different approach to corporate strategy.

Our new Embedded Strategies guide helps companies respond to the growing calls for businesses to articulate their purpose and their strategy in alignment with the need to shift the global economy towards the reduction of inequality, a rapid climate transition, the preservation of biodiversity, and the elimination of waste.

This guide will help you to develop a contextual strategy and goals that ensure your company is doing its part to maintain the resilience of key social and environmental systems.

Building on our Road to Context guide with insights from 300+ interviews with senior executives, CEOs, board chairs, and directors, as well as our experiences supporting companies around the world, it outlines resources and tactics that can help your company to scan for emerging issues and risks; understand their implications for your business; understand your impacts and your potential for positive influence; prioritise where it makes sense to direct your efforts; and set your strategy and goals in alignment with delivering systems value.

Safe and just Earth system boundaries

This study from the Earth Commission uses modelling and literature assessment to quantify safe and just Earth system boundaries for five critical domains: climate, the biosphere, freshwater, nutrient cycles, and aerosols at global and sub-global scale. It builds on the work of the planetary boundaries framework and proposes a set of safe and just boundaries for maintaining the resilience and stability of the Earth system and for minimising human society’s exposure to significant harm. The paper notes that the just operating space is smaller than the safe one for several of the boundaries, and that several have already been transgressed on a global and local scale. This means that unless a timely transformation occurs, irreversible tipping points and widespread impacts on human well-being are likely to be unavoidable.

A just world on a safe planet: a Lancet Planetary Health–Earth Commission report on Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations

This groundbreaking and comprehensive report explains that the Earth's safe and just space for humanity to survive and thrive within is shrinking. The authors assert that the only way to provide for everyone and to ensure societies, businesses, and economies thrive without destabilising the planet is to reduce inequalities in how critical Earth system resources (such as freshwater and nutrients) are accessed and used and to radically transform our economic systems and technologies.

Building on the work of the Safe and Just Earth System Boundaries report, scientists have added a “foundation” by quantifying the safe and just Earth-system boundaries (ESBs) that the global population depends upon to live a life free from poverty. The report describes a safe and just corridor that is essential to ensuring sustainable and resilient human and planetary health and defines eight ESBs across five domains; discusses the need for translating ESBs across scales to inform science-based targets for action by key actors; identifies the system transformations necessary to bring about a safe and just future; and more.

A Good Life For All Within Planetary Boundaries

This tool allows you to explore and compare "national snapshots" of the resource use associated with countries meeting the basic needs of their peoples. This will help you to understand and compare national performance relative to the Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries so that you can better prioritise your sustainability-related efforts.

The Nine Boundaries Humanity Must Respect to Keep the Planet Habitable

This article provides a summary of the Planetary Boundaries Framework and explores the environmental transformations of the Anthropocene era, the early indicators of systems under stress and threatening collapse, the compounding effect of feedback loops, and crucial next steps. If you are new to the concept of planetary boundaries and thresholds, this is a good introduction.

Planetary Boundaries: 'Let the environment guide our development'

First introduced in 2009, this framework identifies and quantifies nine planetary boundaries (or thresholds) which regulate the stability and resilience of the earth. Crossing these boundaries may generate abrupt and irreversible environmental changes that threaten the earth’s capacity to support human life. Tipping points have already been reached for climate change, biodiversity, land-system change, and the nitrogen cycle. In this TED talk, Johan Rockstrom from the Stockholm Resilience Centre introduces the framework, explores how human growth has strained resources, and explains how the global community can prioritise and scale solutions.

The Social Foundation: 'A Safe and Just Place for Humanity'

Kate Raworth's “Doughnut” model is a key framework for understanding sustainability context. Building on the planetary boundaries framework as a 'ceiling', it adds social foundations as a 'floor' and underlines the need to operate in the space between. The social foundation is made up of 11 boundaries that draw attention to communities needing access to basic resources to fulfill their human needs. This access needs to be achieved in a way that does not place undue stress on the earth's resources. The framework is based on the premise that we should be striving to build and maintain social foundations while staying within planetary boundaries.

Doing Business Within Planetary Boundaries

This report can help you to understand how businesses and investors can address the climate and nature crisis by shifting how they measure corporate activities. The report is a collaborative effort from the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Stockholm Resilience Centre, and the Biosphere Program at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and is the result of decades of collaborative and transdisciplinary research combining ecological economics, resilience science, and Earth system science with sustainable finance. The report argues that focusing attention narrowly on companies' most financially material environmental impacts impedes the assessment of cumulative environmental impacts. This undermines the ability to gauge where we are in relation to planetary limits, and is likely to lead to unreliable assessments of climate and nature-related risks and the inability to set informed targets. The report explains how anchoring corporate activities in the planetary boundaries framework can help businesses to drive sustainable transformation, and explains how more fulsome and accurate information about corporate environmental impacts and risk can support this. The report provides an overview of key features that characterise meaningful environmental disclosures as well as science- and sector-based guidance for prioritisation of data collection and disclosing essential environmental impacts. It also provides insights into a new science-based tool, the Earth System Impact score (ESI), which provides information on how a company’s local environmental impacts translate into global effects on climate and nature and can help businesses identify key areas for improving environmental performance and facilitating the development of strategic plans to enhance sustainability.

SASB Materiality Map

The Materiality Map was developed by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB). It ranks issues by industry based on two types of evidence: evidence that investors in the industry are interested in the issue, and evidence that the issue has the ability to impact companies within the industry. Updated annually, this map is a good starting point to get a snapshot of industry specific priorities.

Materiality Assessments: Why It’s Time for a New Approach

Done well, corporate sustainability materiality assessments should improve the quality and relevance of your disclosures and ideally, clarify where your company needs to take action and inform your core business strategy. Unfortunately, most materiality assessments don’t live up to that promise. In this blog post, we reflect on how we got here and why the materiality assessment process is in desperate need of an overhaul.

Double Materiality Assessments: Criteria for a More Robust Process that Supports Strategy and Disclosure

Thinking about how to undertake a double materiality assessment? In this blog post, we share what we consider to be fundamental criteria for a better approach.

The double-materiality concept: Application and issues

If you are looking for a more comprehensive explanation of the concept and applicability of double materiality, this white paper from GRI may be of help. It draws on academic research to investigate how double-materiality is implemented in sustainability reporting and identifies some of the benefits and challenges when applying double-materiality in practice.

Double and Dynamic: How to Enhance the Value of Your Materiality Assessment

BSR has created a blog series focused on expanding the scope and value of materiality assessments. The first can help you to understand the value of taking a scenario-driven approach to double materiality, where stress-testing and scenario analysis are used to determine which sustainability issues are most likely to challenge and undermine the resilience of your organisation. The second can help you to understand the value of taking a scenario-driven approach to double materiality, where stress-testing and scenario analysis are used to determine which sustainability issues are most likely to challenge and undermine the resilience of your organisation. The third can help you to understand the benefits of focusing your materiality assessment on your company's impacts on communities, the environment, and other affected stakeholders rather than on decision-useful disclosures for investors and other report readers.

The Double Materiality Radar

Over the past five years, working with our partner companies, we have been developing, piloting, and refining a comprehensive, impact-oriented double materiality prioritisation process.

In this forthcoming guide, we will share this new approach to corporate sustainability materiality assessment, grounded in context and impacts, that brings more clarity to your disclosures, better insights to your corporate strategy process, and will help your company prioritise where to act to do its part to support sustainability.

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