Responsible Consumption and Production

Living Edition
| Editors: Walter Leal Filho, Anabela Marisa Azul, Luciana Brandli, Pinar Gökcin Özuyar, Tony Wall

Materiality: From Accounting to Sustainability and the SDGs

Living reference work entry
First Online:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71062-4_43-1
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Synonyms

Importance; Relevance; Significance

Definitions

Materiality is the concept that defines why and how certain matters or issues are of importance for a specific company or within a business sector. When an issue is material, it has major impacts on the financial, economic, reputational, and legal dimensions of a company, as well as on the system of internal and external stakeholders of that company.

What Is Materiality?

Introduction to Materiality

The concept of materiality applies to a wide variety of fields: accounting, auditing, reporting, business, financial, legal, risk management, and, more recently, nonfinancial issues (Corporate Reporting Dialogue 2017). This entry analyzes how materiality is defined across these domains with the purpose of providing a comprehensive picture of the concept and proposing a definition in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Before presenting how the entry is organized, it is thus important to highlight the role that materiality...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Director of Innovation, DatamaranLondonUK

Section editors and affiliations

  • Luciana Brandli
    • 1
  1. 1.University of Passo FundoPasso FundoBrazil