Industry-specific ESG metrics for financial decision-making

Overview

SASB Standards identify the subset of ESG issues most likely to be financially material for companies in 77 specific industries across 11 sectors. Unlike GRI's comprehensive impact coverage, SASB is deliberately narrow — it focuses only on topics with evidence of investor relevance, and it quantifies those topics in industry-specific, comparable metrics.

Key Requirements

The 11-sector, 77-industry structure

SASB organises industries into 11 sectors: Technology & Communications, Health Care, Financials, Consumer Discretionary, Consumer Staples, Food & Beverage, Resource Transformation, Extractives & Minerals Processing, Infrastructure, Transportation, and Services. Within each sector, SASB identifies industry-specific standards. For example, the Software & IT Services standard focuses on data privacy and security, whereas the Electric Utilities standard focuses on greenhouse gas emissions and grid reliability.

Financially material vs. comprehensive

SASB's intentional narrowness is both its strength and its limitation. Because SASB only covers financially material topics per industry, a SASB report for a consumer products company will not cover community engagement, indigenous rights, or biodiversity — even if those topics are significant for affected stakeholders. Companies using SASB alone cannot claim comprehensive ESG disclosure. The combination of SASB (for financial materiality) and GRI (for impact materiality) is the dominant approach for large listed companies.

• Average SASB standard covers 13 industry-specific metrics
• Most metrics are quantitative (not narrative), enabling year-on-year comparison
• SASB metrics are aligned to the concepts in IFRS S2 climate disclosures

Integration with ISSB

Since the consolidation of SASB under the IFRS Foundation in 2022, SASB Standards are being progressively integrated into ISSB's work programme. IFRS S1 explicitly states that companies can use SASB Standards to identify what sustainability information is relevant to their industry. Future ISSB sector-specific guidance is expected to draw heavily from SASB methodology.

How OpenESG scores against SASB

For each company, OpenESG identifies the most relevant SASB industry standard and evaluates disclosure against the required accounting metrics. We assess whether each metric is fully disclosed, partially disclosed, referenced but not quantified, or not disclosed. The SASB alignment score reflects the proportion of industry-relevant metrics for which investable-quality data is publicly available.

Common Misconceptions