Addressing Material Social Issues Through Strategic Levers for Impact
The Challenge Social Risks and Opportunities – what materiality is missing
Social issues are increasingly central to operational continuity, risk management and long-term value creation, yet many organisations still struggle to identify and prioritise them within materiality matrices before they escalate into risks. As a result, social issues are often sidelined in favour of more advanced climate risk approaches, creating an overly narrow focus that overlooks opportunities to build resilient communities and de‑risk operations early—an issue explored in depth by Clodagh Connolly, B4SI Global Director, in “Out of Scope? The Dangerous De‑Materialisation of Social Risk.”
Social risks become financially material through channels such as supply chain disruption, labour unrest, community opposition, permitting delays, workforce attrition and productivity loss. Against this backdrop, community investment and related activities are strategic levers — mechanisms for actively managing risks and opportunities — rather than ad hoc philanthropic initiatives. The Taskforce on Inequality- and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD) is shaping a framework that integrates socio-economic risks, opportunities and dependencies into financial disclosures, signalling a welcome move that will help companies gain greater clarity on these two-directional relationships.
Investing in and strengthening social systems sustains the markets, talent pools and communities that businesses depend on. As Clodagh Connolly describes, “Healthy businesses need healthy societies to buy from.” Strategic social investments stand out as a practical means through which organisations can tackle social dependencies, strengthen resilience and support long‑term material value creation.
Signals from the B4SI Network
Drawing on data from the B4SI Global Benchmark for 2024-2025, over 68% of total investment across the network was classified as strategic community investment. This reflects a mature approach, with companies prioritising partnerships that align with long‑term business and sustainability targets, managing and reporting them with clarity against defined goals.
Additionally, there was significant growth in companies assessing the business impacts of their community investments, with Business Impact reporting increasing by 43% year-on-year. Taken together, this shift suggests that companies are increasingly recognising the material role that social factors play in business performance and are embedding community investments more deliberately into strategy, governance, and decision-making.
Below, we dive into what B4SI members Acciona Energía and Ferrovial shared in the recent B4SI webinar ‘Addressing Material Social Issues Through Strategic Levers for Impact’.
Acciona Energía: Social License as a Material Dependency
As a global renewable energy developer, Acciona Energía’s most material social issue is clear:
- Being a responsible and trusted neighbour by ensuring local voices are heard, and that the benefits of renewable energy investment are shared with the communities hosting its projects – delivering long-term value and a lasting legacy in the communities where they operate.
Caroline Pinter, Acciona Energía’s General Manager for Marketing & Corporate Affairs, explains: social licence is a core, material business risk that stretches far beyond reputation into operations.
“If your community doesn’t want you, you’re going to have a problem with your project — regardless of how strong your environmental credentials are.”
Because wind and solar farms directly affect host communities, Acciona Energía recognised that securing long‑term trust and operational stability requires renewable energy investments to deliver shared and lasting economic benefits.
While internal teams understood the importance of positive community impacts, social‑related issues had largely been addressed through ad hoc stakeholder engagement rather than strategic management, making it harder to consistently link trust, inclusion, and local legitimacy to project timelines and viability.
The B4SI Framework provided the structure needed to bridge this gap by clarifying the strategic relevance of social investment and repositioning it from a local engagement activity to a lever linked to project-level risks, opportunities, and long-term value – all supported by credible, decision-useful data.
B4SI provided a structured and credible way to discuss social investment alongside core business considerations, rather than at the margins. Pinter notes:
“The framework helped us shift the conversation internally — from spending money, to building long‑term legitimacy and trust as a strategic asset.”
Ferrovial: Embedding Community Investment into Social Performance
For Ferrovial, a global infrastructure and construction company managing long‑term concessions of up to 75 years, social issues are inseparable from business performance.
Ricardo Navas Hernandez, Ferrovial’s CSR Program Manager, states:
“We don’t just want to be a good neighbour — we want to be the neighbour everyone wants to have.”
Ferrovial’s double materiality assessment identified community‑related impacts, risks and opportunities as among the most complex and significant within its social profile. These issues span local development, human rights and social acceptance. To better manage community impacts, Ferrovial aligns community investment into its strategy, explicitly linking voluntary community investments with local involvement, employees engagement and the development of basic infrastructures.
And, to understand the aggregate impacts of Ferrovial’s investments on communities, Ferrovial turns to the B4SI Framework.
The company’s “On the Move for People” community investment strategy aligns global priorities with local delivery, while B4SI provides the structure to:
- systematise dialogue with communities,
- quantify both infrastructure and community impacts,
- and ensure consistency across geographies.
The adoption of the B4SI framework has enabled Ferrovial to develop a more systematic understanding of how different forms of community contributions come together, how they support social licence, risk management, and long‑term value, and how they align with the company’s strategic priorities. This stronger foundation reinforced internal alignment, enabled clearer dialogue between local and corporate teams, and strengthened the ability to consistently demonstrate impact over time.
Together, these improvements enhance Ferrovial’s capacity to stay ahead of emerging developments, respond effectively to the needs of vulnerable groups, and communicate transparently with both communities and decision‑makers.
Navas Hernandez concluded:
“Having this framework and this methodology helps us have a long‑term track record of what our social impact is and how Ferrovial is committed to our neighbours.”
What Organisations Should Do Next
With social risks and dependencies being integral to operational continuity and long‑term value creation, the challenge for organisations is not to do more, but to deliberately connect social efforts to material business priorities.
For asset‑intensive sectors, such as energy, infrastructure, mining and oil & gas, this means examining how community investment is leveraged to manage dependencies such as social licence, local trust and workforce stability, and shifting the focus from activity to outcomes.
The experiences highlighted by Acciona Energía and Ferrovial demonstrate how the B4SI Framework provides the structure and language needed to support this shift. By adopting the framework, they generate decision-useful data beyond activity reporting and make the value created for both communities and the business visible and clear.
This enables insights to be aggregated consistently across geographies and assets, strengthens business cases, and reinforces the role of social investment within strategic decision–making and budget allocation, positioning it alongside risk and performance discussions.
With TISFD’s beta framework expected in Spring 2026 and widely anticipated to shape future mandatory social‑related disclosure, organisations that begin strengthening their capability through structured approaches are not only better positioned to respond to emerging expectations, but also to future‑proof how social risks, opportunities and dependencies are understood and governed across the organisation.
Contact the B4SI team to learn more
Visit the Events Page to find out about our in-person convenings, where we will be diving into these topics in more detail with our Network and invited guests across EMEA, APAC and North America.