Peer benchmarking is a powerful tool for strategy development, enabling organisations to measure their performance against industry leaders and direct competitors.
By identifying gaps and best practices, benchmarking highlights where you are ahead, where improvements are needed, and how to prioritise actions for maximum impact. It also strengthens credibility with stakeholders by demonstrating that your strategy is informed by external standards and market expectations, not just internal priorities.
Ultimately, peer benchmarking supports more ambitious, practical, and future-ready strategies that keep you competitive in a rapidly evolving ESG landscape.
We work closely with you to define the most relevant peer group for benchmarking, ensuring comparisons are meaningful to your organisation. Our team then conducts detailed analysis across sector-specific sustainability aspects to provide clear, evidence-based insights. This approach highlights comparative strengths and gaps, supporting a strategy that is ambitious, credible, and tailored to your sector.
What We Benchmark
Peer benchmarking works best when it goes beyond a simple scorecard. We look at emissions intensity, energy and waste performance, governance structures, and how mature your policies and management systems are compared with the peers you actually compete with. We also compare reporting framework alignment, checking how your disclosures stack up against GRI, TCFD, or AASB S2 aligned peers, and where a GRESB or B-Corp submission sits relative to others in your sector.
Because we work across ports, aviation, mining, energy, and construction, we understand which metrics genuinely matter in each sector, rather than applying a generic checklist. That means the gaps and opportunities we surface are ones you can act on.
How Our Peer Benchmarking Process Works
We start by defining the right peer group with you: direct competitors, sector leaders, and any organisations whose approach you want to be measured against. From there, we gather publicly available disclosure data, including sustainability reports, GRESB results, and regulatory filings, and analyse it against your own performance and reporting maturity.
The output is a clear, evidence-based view of where you are ahead, where you are behind, and which gaps are worth prioritising first. Many clients use this analysis as an input into a broader sustainability strategy or as supporting evidence for a materiality assessment.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many peers should we benchmark against?
Most peer benchmarking exercises compare against five to ten organisations: a mix of direct competitors and one or two sector leaders you aspire to match. Too few peers gives a skewed picture, and too many makes the findings hard to act on.
How current is the peer data?
We use the most recently published sustainability reports, GRESB results, and regulatory filings available for each peer, and note where a peer’s most recent disclosure is more than a year old.
Can peer benchmarking feed into a materiality assessment?
Yes. Understanding what peers report on and prioritise is a useful input into your own materiality assessment, since it shows what stakeholders in your sector already expect to see.
Do you benchmark against international peers, not just Australian ones?
We can, where it is useful. Many of our clients in ports, aviation, and mining compete against or are compared with international peers, so we include them where relevant. Contact us to discuss the right peer group for your organisation.
Benefits
Identify gaps and opportunities
Compare your performance to peers and industry leaders to see where you stand.
Best Practice Adoption
Learn from proven approaches to strengthen your own ESG performance.
Stay competitive
Ensure your organisation remains aligned with market expectations and ahead of emerging trends.