GEMI Winter Meeting
GEMI winter meeting addresses materiality assessment for corporate sustainability reporting
Members examine best practices for analyzing materiality and aligning sustainability and corporate strategies
Washington, DC – The Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI), the global leader in developing insights, networking and creating collaborative sustainability solutions for business, convened its members for GEMI’s winter meeting focused on methods for assessing sustainability materiality and how best to customize an approach for a company’s specific business needs. GEMI member Sealed Air hosted the meeting, themed “Materiality Part II: How to Take Action,” at its Packforum Americas facility in Atlanta on March 11-12.
“GEMI’s materiality meeting offered our membership the opportunity to learn from and work with highly credible corporate sustainability guest experts who shared their experiences in training corporate sustainability leaders, building reporting frameworks and helping companies sync business and sustainability strategies and metrics,” said Bill Gill, assistant vice president, Environmental Affairs, Smithfield Foods, and chair, GEMI. “This facilitated a lively forum for our members to share their experiences and brainstorm ways to fine-tune their programs.”
The meeting included guest speakers from Hedstrom Associates, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), KPMG and BSR. These experts discussed corporate sustainability leadership development needs, accounting standards, data-sourcing methods and materiality reporting frameworks – including Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Integrated Reporting (IR) and newcomer SASB.
“We used what we learned from our guest speakers on the first day in our second-day working session to build a framework for GEMI’s upcoming Materiality 101 Quick Guide,” said Stan Mierzejewski, senior manager, Sustainability, Tennant, and chair, Tools Work Group, GEMI. “As an organization, GEMI is not only committed to staying ahead of sustainability issues and reporting strategies, but we produce business solutions and tools, such as our quick guides, to help others manage emerging sustainability challenges for their businesses.”
GEMI will publish its Materiality 101 guide in late 2015, and it will be publicly available with complementary material accessible to members only.
The GEMI summer meeting will focus on water issues and will be held in Milwaukee, Wis., on July 7-8, 2015. Non-member companies considering membership may be allowed to join one complimentary meeting. For more information about GEMI, membership benefits and upcoming meetings, visit www.gemi.org.
For More Information Contact:
Monica MacKay, 262.563.5665
About GEMI
GEMI is the global leader in developing insights, networking, and creating collaborative sustainability solutions for business. For 25 years, GEMI has captured the vision and experience of global corporate environmental, health and safety (EHS) and sustainability leaders from diverse business sectors through the development of a wide range of publicly-available, solutions-based tools designed to help companies improve the environment, their operations and add business value.
