A materialidade nos relatórios de sustentabilidade: desenvolvimento de um modelo analítico aplicado ao setor da construção civil brasileira

Abstract

The civil construction industry exerts great influence on the Brazilian and global scenario, with a high potential to generate impacts on issues related to sustainable development. To report these impacts, an increasing number of companies, including those in the construction industry, are using the sustainability reporting model of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Due to the heterogeneity of the stakeholders associated with these companies, it becomes a challenge to determine what types of information should be disclosed in these reports, that is, those that are called "material". Furthermore, there is a lack of studies on quantitative methods involving the issue of materiality, which could reduce subjectivity in this process. In the few studies found, the tools developed for this purpose were not used to evaluate already published reports, but were used as a support for the production of new ones. Furthermore, none of them are specifically targeted at the construction sector. To fill this gap in research, this thesis proposes, applies, and discusses a model based on the "Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with absolute measurement" method to assess the issue of materiality of reports of Brazilian companies in the construction sector, prepared using the GRI standard. The selected organizations were those that have published their sustainability reports according to the GRI Standards since the launch of these guidelines in 2016, totaling fourteen reports, from six companies. After building the hierarchical structure of the model, experts in the construction/environment field were asked to make judgments about the criteria and sub-criteria, with the aim of weighting the degree of importance of the sustainability topics included in the reports. The judgments were collected through a questionnaire, and the weights were added to the model using the Aggregating Individual Priorities method applied to the AHP. The final weights were then validated by other experts. A ranking of the selected reports in relation to materiality was thus established, positively highlighting the reports of the OEC company. The AHP method with absolute measurement proved to be efficient, especially for allowing weightings of criteria and sub-criteria, and can be useful for materiality assessments in sustainability reports of organizations. We conclude that improvements in the quality of these reports are necessary, since there are companies that fail to disclose topics considered relevant, according to the judgment of the experts consulted in this research.