SASB Standards and industry materiality

The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) was set up in the US in 2011. Its idea was simple: the sustainability issues that matter for a bank are very different from those that matter for a cement maker or a software firm. So, instead of one long list of ESG topics, SASB wrote a separate standard for each industry, covering only the topics likely to affect financial performance.

SASB merged with the International Integrated Reporting Council in 2021 to form the Value Reporting Foundation, which joined the IFRS Foundation in 2022. The ISSB now maintains the SASB Standards, and IFRS S1 requires companies to consider them when deciding what to disclose.

For analysts, SASB is the best quick reference for industry materiality. If you are analysing a company in an unfamiliar sector, its SASB standard tells you which ESG issues to look at first.

Structure

• 77 industry standards, grouped into 11 sectors under SASB's industry classification system
• Each standard lists disclosure topics, such as greenhouse gas emissions, data security or workforce safety
• Each topic has accounting metrics, which can be numbers or descriptions
• Activity metrics, such as production volume or number of customers, help normalise the data
• Technical protocols explain how to measure each metric

Examples of material topics

Updates under way

The SASB Standards were last comprehensively updated in 2018, with narrower changes in 2023. The ISSB is now improving them industry by industry, starting with extractives and minerals processing, infrastructure, and food and beverage:

• Proposed changes to nine priority standards closed for comment on 30 November 2025.
• Proposed changes to three more (agricultural products; meat, poultry and dairy; electric utilities and power generators) were open for comment until 24 July 2026.