Material Sustainability Issues

Qatar Steel’s materiality assessment provides insights into the expectations and needs of its stakeholders. It enables us to identify and prioritize the most material sustainability issues through an exclusive and extensive stakeholder engagement process. As part of its sustainability management, Qatar Steel revises its material issues biennially, reviewing the changing industry context, emerging trends, and stakeholder feedback. In 2020, the materiality review and update was carried out in order to align the material issues with the new Corporate Strategy 2021-2025.

Materiality Assessment

The assessment followed the steps given below:

Step 1: Long list of possible material issues

Following on the methodology of the GRI Standards, the first step for conducting a materiality matrix for an organization is through the identification of all the possible issues that will affect the organization and will impact the decision of its stakeholders in relation to the social, environmental and economic issues.
Sustainability Excellence conducted a desktop research to identify those issues and have used the following sources:

• Qatar Steel 2019 sustainability report material issues.
• International leaders in the steel industry identified material issues.
• Material issues identified by World Steel Association.

A list of 28 sustainability issues were identified, for more information please refer to the table given below.

Step 2: Level of materiality assessment

Sustainability Excellence distributed templates of the materiality assessment survey to 17 senior management focal points of different departments asking them to evaluate the 28 material topics proposed. Focal points scored the importance of each issue to Qatar Steel and to their business unit’s three most significant stakeholders using a scale of 1-5. Focal points also added new issues with particular relevance to their functions and rated them accordingly. Annex A includes the actual detailed survey that was shared with focal points.

Sustainability Excellence collected the input of all the focal points and calculated the average of the values assigned to each material issue across each stakeholder group as well as Qatar Steel. The results were analyzed to determine the most material issues for each stakeholder group, for all stakeholders collectively, and for Qatar Steel. Rating of newly added material issues was normalized to account for estimator bias.

Step 3: Development of a materiality matrix and top issues list

The average scores from Qatar Steel and all stakeholder groups combined were used to generate a materiality matrix or ‘map’ plotting each issue on an X-Y axis where the X axis represents the significance of impacts to Qatar Steel. Values input into the final matrix were scaled to fill the 1-5 spectrum. The resulting 2020 materiality matrix for Qatar Steel is presented below representing the issues that are both of high significance for Qatar Steel and highly influential on stakeholders’ assessments and decisions regarding Qatar Steel.