Our belief in sustainability as our core value, key responsibility, and important business driver is reflected in the recognition we receive in Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) ratings and benchmarks.

The ESG ratings and benchmarks universe is experiencing rapid expansion and fragmentation with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) reporting that there are over 2,000 individual ESG reporting indicators requested by the approximately 600 ratings and benchmarks.

There are considerable differences in stakeholder focus and approach with some concentrating on management and strategy and others on performance and metrics. It is not possible for us to actively participate in every benchmark and rating so we prioritize our participation in those that are most useful to us and our stakeholders, specifically:
 

• Transparency in methodology, enabling us and our stakeholders to understand and interpret the results.
• Relying primarily on public information, ensuring that our stakeholders are all assessing us on the same, equal basis.
• Does not create additional, unnecessary workload, enabling us to focus our efforts on engagement and performance improvement.
• Are commonly completed by our industry peers to enable greater comparability.
• Provides sufficient feedback loops to enable us to make sustainable year-on-year improvements and to provide input on future developments of the index.
• Are recognized by our stakeholders as relevant and fit for purpose.

DSM takes part in a number of ESG ratings but the most relevant to DSM Biomedical are the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and EcoVadis.