Impact areas likely to be affected by an option may be identified through a (short) literature review, expert consultation, or a combination of both approaches.
Ideally, stakeholders are also involved in the process to add their perspective as to what impacts should be considered. For including stakeholders’ views, assessments may adapt an approach applied in sustainability reporting, which is called “materiality analysis”. It is used to identify topics for reporting that are material (i.e. relevant) and rank them according to their importance. Only the material topics are be reported and the ranking determines the amount of detail with which each topic is covered (GRI Standards, 2018). For a materiality analysis, the Global Reporting Initiative recommends to create a matrix (see figure 8), where one axis represents the expected seriousness of economic, ecological or social impacts and the other axis represents the importance of the respective impact area for stakeholders. Impact areas that score high on either of the axes are considered material (GRI Standards, 2018).
