Material Issues

The volume of the GRI Guidelines and the wide range of reportable topics therein can lead to very large reports and the danger that the most important information may be lost to the reader. This is why determining materiality is a critical part of reporting in accordance with the Guidelines. For the purposes of this report, we regard materiality as information that has the potential to influence the perception of Communities of Interest (CoIs) and more specifically those who intend to make decisions and assessments about our commitment to sustainability. Materiality, in this context, is the threshold at which an issue or indicator becomes sufficiently important that it should be reported. In other words, we ask ourselves, “does the issue reasonably reflect our environmental, social and economic impacts and would it make a difference if our CoIs knew?” Once again, this year we completed a materiality analysis for the report to help form the reporting structure around our material issues.