Question: Does the company assess its impacts on nature, including biodiversity, within its own operations?
Answer:
Partially
19809043
World Benchmarking Alliance
Kao Corporation
2024
Verified by Steward check_circle
The company discloses that in 2021, it used ENCORE, a risk assessment tool, to extract the factors that depend on and impact the natural capital of its company and extracted five dependent factors and nine impact factors. Further, it discloses that in 2022, it followed the LEAP approach proposed by the beta version of the TNFD as much as possible and took an in-depth look at the relationship between business and biodiversity, using detergents, one of its core products, as an example. Moreover, it redefined the issues by examining the results of its 2021 analysis in addition to the latest competitor benchmarks and various guidelines, reports, and other sources, and then, for each of the key issues, it overlaid a Geographic Information System (GIS) tool and organised them according to the axis of interest of stakeholders and its business activities. Additionally, it used two axes, the axis of stakeholder interest and the axis of importance in its business activities, to create a relative order of the importance of each issue, and as a result, “deforestation,” “drainage into the environment,” and “waste discharge” were identified as the most important issues. Also, it discloses a matrix of materiality identification for biodiversity, which includes all the 13 issues identified as a result of the assessment. [Sustainability Report 2023, 336] However, no evidence was found that the company applied those processes across all its operations, nor was there a disclosure of the full methodology and results.