How do we compare our double materiality assessment with peers?

Read your peers’ published Sustainability Statements and look at which topics they identified as material through their double materiality disclosures. It’s a check that you haven’t missed anything relevant to your sector. If a peer discloses a topic you didn’t deem material, revisit your methodology and your results. If those hold up, the topic probably doesn’t apply to your business.

What to read

The double materiality disclosures in a peer’s Sustainability Statement are the part you want. They list the topics that came out material, and the better ones describe the methodology and thresholds that got them there.

Pick peers by business model rather than by revenue. A company your size in an adjacent sector will have a different value chain and a different set of dependencies, which makes the comparison less useful than it looks on paper.

What to do when the lists differ

If a peer discloses a topic you ruled out, go back to your own work. Check the screening decision, check the reasoning you recorded, check the threshold you applied.

Most of the time the reasoning holds and the difference is a reality. Different value chains, different geographies, different customer bases. A peer sourcing from a region you don’t buy from will carry risks you don’t.

Occasionally the check turns something up, and it’s much cheaper to find it this way than in assurance.

When we run it

We treat the peer comparison as a standard step near the end of an assessment, once conclusions are drafted and before they’re signed off.

Run it earlier and it anchors the team on what peers found. The assessment starts drifting towards the sector consensus, and topics get added because a competitor disclosed them rather than because the evidence supports it. Run it late and it does the job it’s there for, which is catching omissions.

Where the comparison misleads

Peer disclosure quality varies. A published Sustainability Statement tells you what a company concluded, and it rarely tells you how rigorously they got there. A peer with a thin methodology can produce a long list of material topics, and copying it hands you their over-disclosure along with their conclusions.

That matters more under the revised ESRS, where mandatory datapoints were cut by 61% and over-disclosure reads as weak process. A peer list drawn from a 2024 Sustainability Statement was written under a different set of incentives.

Your conclusions still have to be your own

Nothing in a peer’s Statement is evidence for your assessment. Their conclusion about their business supports their file. If a peer comparison prompts you to add a topic, you still need your own screening decision, your own scoring, and your own documented rationale behind it.

The comparison is a prompt to look again. The looking is the part that counts.

Kōan has worked on materiality assessments for 9 years, with companies from listed multinationals to first-time reporters across Europe, Asia and the US. If you want a second pair of eyes on your methodology before your auditor finds the gaps, get in touch.

Melina Gkiolma, Sustainability Consultant, Kōan
Published 29 October 2026 · Last reviewed 11 October 2026

Melina Gkiolma is a sustainability consultant at Kōan, specialising in CSRD and ESRS. She previously worked at Deloitte Luxembourg and is a One Young World Ambassador.