Sustainability and ESG services

Transforming business for a sustainable future

Sustainability is an ever-present global market force reshaping our world. Most forward-thinking businesses are now continually and proactively assessing environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks and opportunities, given the growing importance of sustainability and ESG to both internal and external business stakeholders and investors.

This is being driven by net zero targets, rapidly evolving statutory requirements, the intended downward cascade of requirements to private businesses, through regulation and supply chains, and a host of other wider, powerful commercial impacts.

We support organisations and businesses at every stage of their sustainability journey, helping them to adapt and transform to meet ever-changing regulatory and stakeholder needs and to report on the impact of their activities.

Why is sustainability and ESG important for your business?

Embracing sustainability practices has a wide-ranging impact on organisations, including but not limited to:

• Enhanced reputation, fostering trust among consumers, investors and other stakeholders,
• Proactive identification and action against risks associated with ESG factors leading to long-term resilience and stability,
• Better positioning to attract investment and talent as investors, consumers and the younger workforce increasingly look for your ESG criteria to align with their own sustainable and ethical principles, and
• Remaining competitive and resilient as regulatory bodies and investors increasingly integrate ESG factors into decision-making processes.

How we can help you on your sustainability journey

Just as we already help clients with accounting, audit and advisory on financial metrics, our specialist Sustainability Team provides many of the same services, but focusing on your business’s sustainability and ESG activities. Our work ensures:

• Your impact is measured against the relevant accepted national, international and industry standards,
• You’re compliant with all relevant ESG regulation frameworks, and
• Your stakeholders and investors can be confident that your business is on the right path to sustainability.

Our sustainability and ESG services

Sustainability Maturity Assessment

A maturity assessment is the starting point for every organisation to evaluate its current sustainability and ESG practices and provide recommendations for improvements.

Our maturity assessment has been developed by our firm specifically for privately owned UK organisations who are starting out on their sustainability journey.

Our methodology is based on a tailored set of questions, providing recommendations to help improve this maturity score going forward.

These recommendations will help to progress your organisation to fulfil its commitment to sustainability and ESG, enabling it to benefit from long-term resilience and stability, improved stakeholder relations and reputation, and reduced risk.

You’ll also be able to reperform the assessment periodically to track tangible progress and benchmark performance against our database organisations to assess relative position and performance against peers.

Why do I need a sustainability and ESG maturity assessment?

ESG Materiality Assessment

One of the key early stages in your sustainability journey is a materiality assessment – a process to identify what your sustainability and ESG issues are and which are most important to address and improve upon.

So that you can focus your investment, resources and efforts on the right issues, we’ll assess these topics through a double materiality lens:

• Outside in – how an issue impacts your business
• Inside out – how your business can make an impact on the issue

The output from the assessment is a materiality matrix, ranking the key ESG issues in order of importance to your stakeholders, which will become the focus for driving your sustainability policies, strategies and governance.

There’s no one-size fits all approach, and so our materiality assessment is tailored to your business and your requirements. Using our bespoke process, aligned with the globally recognised UN Sustainable Development Goals, we’ll work closely with you to complete a robust, evidence-led and highly engaging assessment process, to help you in identifying the ESG issues most material to your business and its stakeholders.

Other services

We also provide a range of other sustainability and ESG services to organisations. This includes sustainability and ESG reporting support, including both advice on and assurance over disclosures, ESG due diligence, implementation of carbon accounting systems, and natural capital recognition.

Reporting against sustainability and ESG criteria needs to follow a recognised, clear methodology and framework. Our significant experience of supporting companies with their financial information means we’re well placed to apply the same rigorously high standards to reporting on non-financial metrics.

If you’d like to discuss your sustainability and ESG requirements, please get in touch with Stuart Macdougall.