Impact data company Upright announced the launch of a new database covering 50,000 companies aimed at providing companies and investors with CSRD double materiality assessments.

“Double materiality” is one of the hallmark new approaches introduced by the EU’s new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), requiring reporting both on the risks and impact of sustainability issues on an enterprise, as well as on the enterprises’ impacts on environment and society.

According to Upright, the launch of the new database comes to address challenges facing companies and investors in performing and utilizing double materiality assessments, with the CSRD framework leaving significant room for interpretation, creating difficulties in setting materiality thresholds, and comparing assessments across companies. Companies and investors are also contending with regulatory updates, with Upright noting in particular the EU’s Omnibus proposal, which aims to ease the reporting burden on companies and significantly narrow the scope of companies covered by the CSRD regulation.

Upright Founder & CEO Annu Nieminen said:

“The EU scaling back sustainability ambitions because traditional, manual approaches to reporting were burdensome misses the point entirely. CSRD’s vision for comparable, decision-useful double materiality data wasn’t flawed – the execution was. With this launch of data-driven double materiality assessments for 50,000+ companies, Upright wants to show that third-party data providers can decrease the manual burden while maintaining, or even increasing, reporting quality.”

Upright said that the analysis underlying the new database is provided by the firm’s data engine, which integrates information from sources ranging from, more than 300 million scientific articles and public databases to information supplied directly by companies.

According to Upright, the new database will enable companies to efficiently create conduct robust, data-driven double materiality assessments, with an ability to benchmark material impacts, risks, and opportunities against competitors, and investors to identify sustainability-related risks and opportunities in their portfolios.

Nieminen, said:

“CSRD is a huge amount of work that leaves a lot of room for interpretation for companies. There’s a genuine hunger for structured, comparable data – we’ve seen sustainability directors and ESG researchers enthusiastically sharing Excel spreadsheets comparing less than 20 published ESRS reports they’ve managed to find online. That’s why we believe our database of 50,000 data-driven double materiality assessments will be transformative.”