Methodological Triangulation of Double Materiality Disclosures against Independent Life-Cycle Assessments

• Abiodun Okunola

  Ladoke Akintola University Technology

  Author

Corporate sustainability reporting under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) mandates double materiality assessments, yet the reliability of these self-reported disclosures remains unverified against independent environmental performance data. This study addresses the gap by methodologically triangulating double materiality disclosures against life cycle assessment (LCA) outcomes across 847 firm-years from 156 European listed companies (2018–2024). Using a convergent parallel mixed-methods design, we extract financial and impact materiality rankings from sustainability reports and compare them against independent cradle-to-gate LCA results derived from Ecoinvent 3.10 and EXIOBASE 3 databases. The triangulation framework achieves 89.4% alignment accuracy in identifying material topics that correspond to significant environmental hotspots, with a mean divergence coefficient of 0.23 (SD = 0.08) across sectors. Findings reveal systematic over-disclosure of climate-related topics (71.2%) and under-disclosure of biodiversity and water impacts (43.8%). The study contributes a replicable triangulation protocol that transforms double materiality from a judgment-based exercise into an empirically verifiable process, offering practitioners a decision-support tool and policymakers a validation mechanism for CSRD enforcement

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Copyright (c) 2026 Abiodun Okunola (Author)

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