Upright Launches Free Double Materiality Assessment Solution
Impact data company Upright announced the launch of a new double materiality assessment (DMA) tool, capable of providing companies with real-time DMAs, including clarity on key impacts, risks, and opportunities, using just a company URL.
Upright said that it is offering the new tool free of charge, with organizations that have advanced sustainability reporting assurance needs able to upgrade to access the solution’s enterprise-level features.
“Double materiality” is one of the hallmark new approaches introduced by the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive’s (CSRD) European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), requiring reporting both on the risks and impact of sustainability issues on an enterprise, as well as on the enterprises’ impacts on environment and society.
According to Upright, the new solution will allow users to create a full double materiality assessment “in minutes instead of months,” and provide an in-depth analysis covering all 80+ ESRS topics, as well as the ability to drill down to the impact and financial materiality of each of product and service individually.
Upright Founder & CEO Annu Nieminen said:
“The first widely adopted wave of ESG assumed the world’s sustainability dilemmas would be solved if companies just reported more. It’s clear that it hasn’t worked. Too many sustainability experts still spend their days collecting data instead of driving change. Having built one of the world’s leading impact data engines, we felt it was almost our duty to give them a faster, better way — one that replaces manual work with traceable, comparable impact data tied to financial risks and opportunities.”
Upright described the process through which the new solution builds sustainability assessments, starting with the user feeding in a company URL, with the solution finding the company’s product and service information from online sources, and matching that with global scientific research, public databases, and value chain impacts within its engine, and then running the product through the DMA framework consisting of hundreds of detailed sustainability questions, using Upright’s pre-modelled answers for each. The DMA provided allows users to review and refine the results with company specific nuances including detailed product information and revenue splits.
Additional features for upgraders include the ability to layer in extra input data, invite colleagues to collaborate, benchmark against peers, and translate results into anticipated financial effects.
According to Upright, the new solution is the first in a series of real-time application it expects to introduce, with investor-focused versions already in development.
Nieminen added:
“The sustainability industry is starting to challenge the assumption that companies themselves would be the best source of truth about their own impacts. After all, most of them happen outside the company’s walls — across value chains and markets. With the best technology and human structuring, we can assess those impacts objectively, on a very granular product and service level, and with full comparability across companies and industries.”