How our DMA support helped Woodland Group unlock big opportunities

The big challenge

Firms handling, storing, and shipping products globally face some of the biggest sustainability challenges going: the urgency of rapidly decarbonising their operations, minimising waste and pollution, and ensuring worker wellbeing.

At the same time, the pressure is on to maintain a competitive edge amid growing economic volatility and increasingly disruptive extreme weather events.

Enter Woodland Group: the ambitious global supply chain and logistics firm keen to tackle these challenges and ensure that its sustainability efforts are highly targeted to have the greatest possible impact.

The big opportunities

Beyond the challenges, the opportunities for unlocking business transformation through a Double Materiality Assessment (DMA) are huge.

From enhancing decision-making and improving operational efficiency, through to strengthening stakeholder trust and gaining a strategic advantage, we’ve always embraced the use of DMAs as a strategic tool, and we enjoy using them to reveal big wins for clients such as Woodland Group.

Our people-shaped support

Our experts think outside the tick-box, getting a deep understanding of your complexities inside and out, before empowering you to act by simplifying them for you and your team. And that's exactly what we did with Woodland Group.

Rather than just firing out a survey and hoping for the best, our double materiality assessment for Woodland Group actively engaged key internal and external stakeholders to build a rich understanding of the group’s IROs (that’s Impacts, Risks and Opportunities to people like you and me):

where the Group's operations impact on society and the environment
the external risks and opportunities that affect the business now, and will do so in the future

Following some genuinely enjoyable – and insightful – stakeholder engagement sessions, we brought it all to life with a materiality matrix that illustrated the most important IROs for the business to concentrate on. Simple enough for all staff to understand, detailed enough to be useful for decision makers.

From this, we worked with Woodland Group’s team to co-develop the key recommendations – all of which we framed through the group’s specific business, strategic and financial contexts – ensuring sustainability was successfully embedded throughout. These included establishing science-based decarbonisation targets; mapping its impact on nature further to focus effort where it is most needed, as well as increasing circularity in resource use and improving wellbeing.

The big impact

Woodland Group is an ambitious leader in this space – and given the team’s innovative, values-led approach and desire to work with like-minded partners, we also provided recommendations on where else it can innovate – to push far beyond reporting compliance. This included our expert guidance on how to collaborate with relevant NGOs and other partners, to better understand the root causes of any issues and to increase visibility throughout the supply chain.

Woodland Group’s ambitious sustainability strategy is now being revised so that it focuses on the most material issues for the business and is in line with our recommendations.

The company is now well-positioned to achieve its impressive sustainability ambitions and effectively respond to future risks and embrace the many opportunities for transformation. And most importantly, Woodland Group is now empowered to make more confident, strategic decisions.

"Thanks to Bioregional, we're not only better positioned to meet the challenges of a changing world, but we're also strengthening our position as a leader in sustainable practices within our industry."