Pictured: CSL Employees in Melbourne, Australia
We engage our patients, end-consumers and other stakeholders regularly to better understand the issues that are most important to them. We also periodically undertake a formal materiality assessment process that guides us on the current and emerging sustainability-related topics that are most significant to our operations, and, in turn, informs our sustainability strategy.
Stakeholder engagement is a foundation of our approach to sustainability, and we have identified our key stakeholders as patient groups, employees, investors, regulators, suppliers, government, healthcare professionals, plasma donors, business partners and the academic and scientific community.
Stakeholder engagement covers many different activities from the provision of information and educational material to health service providers, through to active collaboration with, and support of, patient organisations and structured dialogue with stakeholder representatives.
The table shown contains a list of our key stakeholders and their interests and the key mechanisms in which we engage with them.
Driven by our strategic framework, performance across our sustainability focus areas supports the execution of our 2030 Strategy and our sustainability vision for a healthier world. Our sustainability strategy focus areas are further guided by our material topics, which inform continuous improvement across our operations and transparency in areas that matter most to our key stakeholders.
CSL’s Executive Sustainability Committee (ESC) has overall responsibility for the materiality process and executes a global materiality assessment on a biennial basis. In 2024, we concluded our sixth assessment and followed the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI 3) Material Topics 2021 by understanding organisational context, identifying actual and potential negative and positive impacts, assessing the significance of impacts and prioritising the most significant impacts for reporting. The application and disclosure of our materiality process against the principle of materiality as defined in GRI 3 was subject to limited external assurance by Deloitte.
Our sixth materiality assessment included all of the CSL group of businesses, comprising CSL Behring, including CSL Plasma, CSL Seqirus and CSL Vifor.
The first stage of the materiality process involved developing a universal list of topics driven by an evidence-based approach involving: a current state assessment (review of previous assessment and possible improvements); desktop research, including a global media scan and review of key global frameworks and sector standards; peer benchmarking; mapping to emerging global risks; alignment with CSL’s 2030 strategy; and internal review by CSL’s ESC.
The resulting material topics were prioritised by a group of 170 internal representatives from across the organisation and including seven external stakeholders with deep knowledge of the industry. A survey questionnaire was sent to both internal and external stakeholders to identify the economic, environmental, social, people and governance topics they considered material, being the topics that represent an organisation’s most significant impacts on the economy, environment, and people, including impacts on their human rights.
Finally, the survey results informed the shaping of the materiality matrices, which served as the final output for the prioritisation of CSL’s most material topics. The results of the matrices were consolidated to produce a prioritised list by identifying the topics that were rated highest by stakeholders, as indicated by the topics that were plotted in the outer ring of the resulting matrices.
The final prioritised list was grouped by sustainability pillar (environment, social and sustainable workforce) and endorsed by the Executive Sustainability Committee.
With our evolved sustainability strategy, CSL’s material sustainability topics were re-grouped under our new focus area categories as depicted below.
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In CSL’s 2023/24 Annual Report, the material topics of Employee health, safety and wellbeing; and Employee development and retention, can be found in the Promising Futures chapter.
CSL's Material Sustainability Topics 2024 received limited assurance by Deloitte (2024). View content that received limited assurance here.
