Manage your due diligence obligations, ensure social compliance and mitigate risks across your supply chain to accelerate your ESG strategy

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Human rights due diligence (HRDD) refers to an actionable step for businesses to proactively manage and mitigate adverse human rights risks across their entire value chain.

For businesses worldwide, operating ethically is becoming a must-have. Companies are increasingly being required to adopt measures to identify, cease, prevent, mitigate and publicly account for negative actual and potential human rights impacts. This relates to a company’s complete value chain – including indirect suppliers.

Existing and emerging laws share a common approach based on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, aiming to create transparency across global supply chains and ultimately, protect human beings. See a summary of national laws and international guidelines here.

Carrying out HRDD will benefit businesses by:

• Preventing the company’s exposure to human rights risks and related legal and financial liabilities
• Inspiring greater trust from customers and employees
• Attracting investors seeking sustainable investments
• Providing greater awareness of the negative impacts of human rights abuses
• Differentiating themselves from competitors by demonstrating integrity and resilience
• Improving adaptability and profitability due to better risk management – especially by mitigating reputational risk
• Moving them towards a harmonized legal framework bridging accountability and reporting across various legal instruments

DNV’s approach to ensuring social compliance across your value chain

DNV’s approach for conducting HRDD is a structured risk management process with associated methodologies and requirements developed for conducting human rights due diligence assessments. We support businesses by crafting comprehensive, responsible, and practical approaches to managing human rights risks in both the short and long-term.

DNV’s social risk management program bridges our expertise and analytical power in the domain of human rights with the use of innovative digital tools – such as our social compliance listening tool Worker Voice – allowing for numerous advantages compared to conventional, purely audit based players.

How does it work?

We will:

• Assess your exposure to human rights risks and the organizational capacity to address them
• Conduct supply chain mapping applying a human rights risk filter
• Assess the maturity of your policies and systems to effectively manage human rights risk
• Leverage a cost effective, digital approach to establish appropriate preventive measures for the risks identified
• Design a remediation action plan
• Support continuous monitoring efforts or conducted as needed, independent of an audit cycle

Reach out to our team of experts to find out how we can support you to mitigate your exposure to human rights risks and accelerate your ESG strategy.