Altum Group has undertaken an internal business-wide Double Materiality Assessment to understand both internal and external impacts as a result of business operations. We did this to align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).
Having implemented various Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives previously, we embarked on a more integral sustainability journey from 2021 with the mandate from our C-Suite to: “continue to evolve and build a sustainable business that simultaneously looks after our people and planet”.
We began by forming an ESG committee dedicated to taking Altum on the journey to become a sustainable business. We engaged with True, a local sustainability consultancy, who have proven invaluable in helping us navigate the complex ESG landscape. True helped us measure our carbon footprint from 2021 and begin to understand our existing impacts at an operational level.
Zena Couppey, Chief Executive Officer at Altum Group signed up to the UN Global Compact to send a clear message that throughout our business we aligned with universal principles on human rights, labour, environment, and anti-corruption, and take actions that advance societal goals.
Having understood our baseline position, we undertook a thorough and thought-provoking series of workshops with input from across the business. True guided us through a series of impact statements and considerations to understand the reality of how we contribute to the UN SDGs.
Many ESG strategies stop at Climate and Employees, but we wanted to consider our whole business and to be clear about where we have the biggest impact through our entire value chain. We also wanted to understand where our risks lie and ensure all financial material factors are being considered and managed.
What we feel makes the UN SDGs such a useful framework is their recognition that risk and opportunities are two sides of the same coin. They also acknowledge the necessary aspects of sustainable economic growth, innovation and the role industry has to play in the global achievement of the goals.
We have identified the six core goals that are material to our business, on a “double materiality” basis. We will have peripheral impacts on the rest of the goals, but our core goals represent those we can and do have the most impact on.
We have built a strategy and set of initiatives that we will work towards to improve our impacts. Some of these include our people strategy and tackling climate change in our operations. But most importantly we are working on building sustainability into every job description and performance appraisal, every client review, every procurement decision, every board meeting and into our stakeholder reporting.
This is the work of the next six years, and we are excited to build upon the work we have previously done in this area to make meaningful change to finance flows towards sustainable development.