Managing sustainability

Sustainability governance

The Executive Committee is responsible for incorporating our sustainability agenda into the company strategy and monitoring the performance of each business through the Operational Control Cycle. Given our focus on sustainability, overall ownership of sustainability is with the CEO.

The Sustainability Council advises and updates the Executive Committee on new developments, performance and the integration of sustainability into our management processes (see the Corporate governance statement).

Materiality assessment

We use the principle of materiality to review our strategic priorities and assess the topics included in this integrated report. We annually determine the most material topics for our industry, based on the material topics as identified by reporting frameworks (e.g. Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB)) and sustainability indexes (e.g. EcoVadis and Sustainalytics). The significance for each of these material topics is determined and validated annually and reported in our annual report. More details can be found in our Reporting principles.

Reporting principles and frameworks

When combining disclosures in this Report 2022 with disclosures on our website, we report in accordance with 2021 GRI standards, though we’re still maturing our materiality process. We provide an overview of the significance of our material topics in our reporting principles, based on a desktop approach from the Sustainability Team, to align with the GRI 2021 standards. We’re also in the process of further implementing the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). We provide index tables for GRI, SASB and TCFD on our website.

While we work towards improving the maturity of our non-financial information, a selection of key KPIs is subject to limited assurance. We use our internally developed reporting principles to make our reporting more precise and aligned with our business operations. We used the GRI standards to develop and update our reporting principles. The complete reporting principles can be found on our website (Reporting Principles Sustainability statements 2022: https://www.akzonobel.com/en/about-us/sustainability-/reporting-principles-) and a summary is included in the Appendix of this Report 2022. Grupo Orbis is not yet included in the sustainability metrics, except for female executives and AkzoNobel Cares.

The preparation of our Sustainability statements requires management to make judgements, estimates and assumptions that affect reported amounts, especially for the KPIs “Sustainable solutions” and “Scope 3 carbon footprint”. The estimates and assumptions are based on experience and various other factors believed to be reasonable under the circumstances. The estimates and underlying assumptions are reviewed on an ongoing basis. More details on the methodology and significant assumptions can be found in the reporting principles on our website.