Materiality was again in the spotlight recently with launch of IFRS sustainability disclosure standards S1 & S2. Whilst the standards were generally welcomed as a significant step in creating a global baseline for corporate sustainability disclosures grounded in the best practices of accounting standards it was seen as controversial in some quarters. In a large part this was due to its approach to dealing with materiality and more specifically ‘double materiality’ — something largely avoided in the standards according to critics. Proponents highlight the mantra that “what can be measured can be managed” when suggesting that focusing on single materiality / materiality should be the priority for disclosing organisations and is thus the focus of these standards. Double materiality encompasses not just sustainability risks which impact a company’s financial performance but the degree to which that company’s products and activities impact the wider world — a philosophy more adopted in European standards such as in the work of EFRAG.

As part of UKSIF's Good Money Week, Planet Tracker and Trase Finance come together to explore what actions investors and lenders can take to mitigate the risk of financing deforestation, with the case study of the Gran Chaco.

Trase Finance uses supply chain modelling to allocate annual commodity-specific deforestation risk in hectares to investors based on their total equity ownership in commodity traders exposed to deforestation via investing subsidiaries and fund shareholdings. For the first time this allows for a quantifiable and robust way to rank asset managers according to their exposure to deforestation risk.