Metsä Group publishes annually a Sustainability Report which presents the sustainability work and the progress the company has made on the set goals. We want to provide our stakeholders with reliable and accurate information. That is why a third party verifies the content of the report. Metsä Group has long traditions in transparent reporting since Metsä Group's predecessor’s, Metsä-Serla’s , first environmental report was published in 1989.
Metsä Group’s Sustainability Report contains a wealth of both qualitative and quantitative data that stakeholders must be able to rely on. The assurance of sustainability data is voluntary, but at Metsä Group it is an established way of reporting. By assuring the data we can provide our stakeholders with data that is as accurate as possible. In addition, the observations made by the external party also help us to develop our own operations. But what happens during the assurance?
Assurance is collaboration between specialists
The assurance of the data in Sustainability Report is carried out in cooperation between Metsä Group’s mills personnel, specialists of various operations, the management and an external assurance provider. The assurance project is kicked off in the autumn, but its busiest phase occurs early in the year, when the environmental, HR and other key indicators concerning the reporting period are completed.
In the assurance, an external party reviews the calculation methods employed and checks that the indicators have been reported correctly in our internal systems. The assurance providers choose some of our locations to be visited and familiarise themselves with the data gathering systems and methods. The locations to be verified vary from one year to the next.
The assurance providers issue an assurance statement which can be found at the end of the Sustainability Report. The statement includes a description of the assurance process and a summary of the observations and recommendations.
“An assurance by an external party is important for the credibility of data and as well as for the development of our reporting. Our goal is to report our material sustainability topics as transparently and clearly as possible. The observations made by external experts also help us to develop our operations,” says Hanna Kalliomäki, Sustainability Communications, Metsä Group.