What ESG strategy and advisory work covers
ESG strategy establishes which issues genuinely affect the organisation and its stakeholders, what position it intends to take on each, and how progress will be measured. A materiality assessment is the foundation: without it, an ESG programme spreads effort evenly across issues of wildly different consequence.
The UAE Climate Law changes the calculation
Federal Decree-Law No. 11 of 2024 introduced greenhouse gas obligations for entities operating in the UAE, which moves emissions from a reporting question to a compliance one. Organisations that treated carbon accounting as a disclosure exercise now need the measurement to be defensible, and the reduction pathway to be real rather than aspirational.
How CLA Emirates approaches it
We run materiality as an evidence exercise, testing what stakeholders actually raise rather than what a benchmark suggests they should. Strategy is then built around the small number of issues that survive that test. Where targets are set, we work backwards from what the data can currently support, because a public commitment the reporting cannot evidence is a governance risk rather than a position.
