ABSTRACT
In law and accounting, 'materiality' is used in relation to disclosing certain circumstances with a threshold financial consequence, usually in relation to public disclosure for listed companies or merger/acquisition activity. In sustainability, the 'materiality' is a relative term with fluid boundaries, flexible to organisational strategies and currently the subject of some disagreement. In 2013 Coca-Cola became the first company to disclose a sustainability risk in its compulsory Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Traditional concepts of materiality can mean that organisations underachieve on issues that are below materiality thresholds in two ways. First, organisations can ignore issues that are outside the materiality limits. Second, many of the 'business-as-usual' Organisational Issues will be included in organisational processes, but Sustainability Issues might be ignored. The outputs from a materiality process become inputs to a good communications strategy. Materiality processes can drive understanding of sustainability and profoundly affect organisational culture.
