Capture stakeholder engagement for the materiality assessment

A stakeholder engagement is a single, dated exchange with a defined stakeholder group – an employee survey, an investor discussion or a workshop with suppliers, for example. This record proves that the views of relevant stakeholders fed into the climate-related materiality determination.

Prerequisites

• An active reporting period with a locked CSRD reporting boundary exists.
• The DMA assessment is in “Draft” status.
• You have permission to edit the DMA assessment.

Step by step

1. Open the “Climate Double Materiality Assessment” page via the “Climate → Climate DMA” menu and scroll to the “Stakeholder Engagement” section.
2. Click “+ Add engagement” at the top right. The side dialog “Add stakeholder engagement” opens on the right.
3. Complete the “Engagement details” section: “Stakeholder group” (mandatory, for example Employees, Investors or Suppliers), “Engagement method” (mandatory, for example Survey, Interview or Workshop) and “Engagement date”. The date is prepopulated with today and must not be in the future.
4. If you select “Other” as the group, the additional field “Group (please specify)” appears. Enter the stakeholder group in plain text there (maximum 255 characters).
5. In the “Findings” section, use “Key findings” to summarize what the stakeholders said and how it informs the materiality determination. The field is mandatory and requires between 10 and 5,000 characters.
6. Under “Perspective on climate materiality”, select the assessment represented by the stakeholder – from Highly Material through to No Opinion. This field is mandatory as well.
7. Place the engagement in context in the “Links and notes” section: “Highlighted subtopics” marks the ESRS E1 subtopics the stakeholder emphasized, and “Linked impacts” connects the engagement to climate impacts you have already recorded. Add any further remarks under “Notes” (maximum 2,000 characters).
8. Click “Save” at the bottom. Once validation passes, the confirmation “Engagement record saved.” appears; “Cancel” closes the dialog without saving.

What happens next

• The new engagement appears immediately in the “Stakeholder Engagement” table on the Climate DMA page.
• The engagement counter in the “Assessment status” section increases by one.
• The “Stakeholder Engagement” recommendation in the completeness check counts as passed as soon as at least one engagement exists. While it is still open, the “→ Stakeholder engagement” link in the “Validate assessment” dialog takes you straight into the same capture dialog.
• The operation is logged in the activity history.

The “Linked impacts” area is only visible once the DMA assessment already contains climate impacts. The first impact you select is saved as the primary link and shown on the engagement detail page.

Practical tip: link every engagement to the specific climate impacts it relates to. This creates an auditable trail from stakeholder input to materiality decision – far more robust for external auditors than a blanket justification written at the end of the reporting period. ESRS 2 and ESRS E1 explicitly require the materiality analysis to incorporate the views of relevant stakeholders.