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Blog | Wednesday November 28, 2018

Four Steps to Align ESG and Enterprise Risk Management (ERM)

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As outlined in BSR’s recent report, Redefining Sustainable Business: Management for a Rapidly Changing World, resilient business strategies require an enterprise risk management (ERM) approach that effectively incorporates sustainability risks of material significance to the company, such as climate change, natural resource availability, and social volatility.  

An executive we recently interviewed outlined it this way: “Risk awareness needs to become much greater now that we are living in a riskier world and facing issues such as the rise of authoritarianism, cybercrime, and migration. We will see companies having much greater oversight of risk, and investors will be much more demanding of this than in the past.” 

Risk awareness needs to become much greater now that we are living in a riskier world and facing issues such as the rise of authoritarianism, cybercrime, and migration. We will see companies having much greater oversight of risk, and investors will be much more demanding of this than in the past.

There is a clear opportunity for companies to utilize the outputs of sustainability-oriented materiality assessments and align materiality and risk identification processes.  

The World Economic Forum’s 2008-2018 annual Global Risk Reports show that environmental and societal risks have overtaken economic and geopolitical risks in terms of both likelihood and impact. However, companies are not addressing conventional risks and sustainability risks equally. According to WBCSD, fewer than one in three issues identified in sustainability materiality assessments are disclosed as risk factors in legal filings for investors.  

Failing to manage ESG risks can lead to material business impacts, including missed profits, operational impacts, and loss of license to operate. Meanwhile, mainstream investors are increasingly emphasizing disclosure of ESG risks, monitoring ESG performance, and reporting on ESG issues: The recently released 2018 US SIF report found that investors today consider ESG factors across US$12 trillion of professionally managed assets, which represents a 38 percent increase since 2016. Although risk and sustainability teams are often siloed, there is a clear business case for corporate sustainability leaders to collaborate with risk teams on shared goals. 

Incorporating sustainability into ERM can strengthen a company’s understanding of its full suite of risks, improve its sustainability management, and enhance overall business performance. Likewise, incorporating an ERM lens into materiality assessments can help to translate results into language relevant to the business. BSR has assessed the major needs and challenges to align sustainability priorities with ERM and recommends the following four-step approach:  

1. Identify the full spectrum of your company’s risks—including environmental, social, and governance risks. Use ESG risk identification methods, megatrend analysis, and media monitoring (for example, using tools like Polecat), to comprehensively identify both established and emerging risks.  
2. Align on priority ESG issues for inclusion in ERM and modify your ERM inventory accordingly. Conduct a gap assessment of your existing risk inventory, translate specific emerging and existing material issues across priority ESG issues and existing ERM issues, and make necessary adjustments to your materiality analysis and risk inventories.  
3. Evaluate relevant risks for likelihood, vulnerability, and impact. Use high-level risk assessments that consider less conventional criteria like impacts to reputation, speed of onset, persistence, and ability to mitigate to help enhance understanding of difficult-to-measure sustainability risks. You can also leverage forecasting and futures scenario analysis to assess the unique characteristics of longer-term and rapidly emerging sustainability risks.  
4. Maintain ongoing ERM and materiality alignment. Put effective governance structures in place that ensure emerging and evolving issues are captured by both sustainability and ERM teams to support ongoing ERM and materiality alignment. 

This approach can help your company improve its processes to better manage emerging, cross-cutting, significant, and long-term risks. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help your company align your sustainability and risk management frameworks and priorities, please contact us.

Blog | Tuesday November 27, 2018

Business Calls for Strong Guidelines and Increased Climate Ambition at COP24

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At COP24, the world’s governments will convene at the most important climate negotiations since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015. This meeting comes in the wake of the release of the IPCC Special Report Global Warming of 1.5ºC and amid increasing global political instability, as evidenced by Brazil’s presidential elections, the ousting of pro-climate action Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in Australia, and the Trump administration’s continued dismantling of U.S. climate policy. Moreover, it will unfold in the face of extreme climate impacts across the globe, including the recent deadly California forest fires.

While the IPCC report makes it clear that we must act now to curb potentially devastating climate-related events, it also shows that achieving net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 is both possible and necessary to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goals. In this time of urgency, businesses, governments, and other stakeholders must do this together—reinforcing ambition loops that will drive system-wide progress to reach these goals and create a resilient, just, and zero-carbon future.

Business is contributing to the stability that will help governments feel confident that they can do this. Through We Mean Business, a coalition of nonprofit organizations working with the world’s most influential businesses to take action on climate change, business helps drive policy ambition and accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy. Over 830 leading companies, representing US$16.9 trillion in market capitalization, equivalent to 20 percent of global GDP, have made more than 1,350 bold climate commitments, through the coalition's Take Action campaign.

Noting the urgency and that we must act faster and more inclusively, business is looking to policymakers to build on the progress to date and step up their ambition. Bold targets and clear timelines from governments give businesses the clarity and confidence they need to put forward even more ambitious commitments of their own, which in turn helps governments further strengthen and enhance national climate policies.

Bold targets and clear timelines from governments give businesses the clarity and confidence they need to put forward even more ambitious commitments of their own.

Business calls for a just transition

The transition from a fossil fuel economy to net-zero global GHG emissions in the second half of this century, as the Paris Agreement envisions, will require significant technological, social, and economic transformations. Companies must deliver a large share of these transformations but will only be able to do so if unions, workers, and communities are engaged and active participants.

For specific regions and sectors that will undergo a major transition, this requires initiating tripartite social dialogue with businesses and workers to secure trust and productive coordination between partners. For high-emitting sectors, this will mean integrating investment in training and skills provision into sectoral decarbonization pathways—as well as providing social security for workers moving from high-emitting jobs into low-emitting jobs—while ensuring investments and policies incentivize new, decent green jobs.

Business calls for government participation in the Talanoa Dialogue

At COP24, governments should participate fully in the Talanoa Dialogue and clearly signal their intention to increase ambition by updating nationally determined contribution (NDC) targets and creating long-term strategies. This includes communicating these targets and strategies before 2020 and aiming for net-zero emissions as early as possible, with leading economies aiming to achieve this by 2050 at the latest. Governments should implement collaborative, participatory engagement processes with key stakeholders; include mechanisms to initiate periodic (e.g. every five years) upwards revisions to targets; and account for employment, education, skills-building, and social planning to ensure a just transition.

Business calls for strong Paris rulebook guidelines

Finally, to ensure the implementation of the Paris Agreement, a strong rulebook with the following guidelines will give businesses the clarity and confidence they need to put forward even more ambitious commitments of their own.

• A global stocktake that drives ambition and considers input from stakeholders, including business;
• Common implementation periods and target years for NDCs to improve their comparability and enable businesses to more accurately calibrate decisions across a global set of NDCs;
• An enhanced transparency framework that credibly tracks progress, making it easier for business to plan their own climate strategies and goals; and
• Strong guidelines to protect the environmental integrity of carbon markets and enable the lowest-cost emissions reductions which enables business to seek out cost-effective emissions reductions.

As we look at the climate policy landscape in 2019, including to the UN Secretary General’s Climate Summit in September, and COP26 in 2020, where the next round of NDCs will be tabled, it is clear that COP24 is a key moment. We urge governments to step up their ambition and partner with business to ensure a successful COP24 that lays down the necessary foundation for a resilient, just, and zero-carbon future.

To read the business call for governments in more detail, please see the full publications here.

Blog | Monday November 19, 2018

Making Supply Chains Work for Women

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Today, BSR is pleased to launch a new video that sets out why and how companies should work to drive gender equality in global supply chains. We invite you to take a moment to watch it below.   

There are many opportunities for companies to promote gender equality in supply chains—through their own actions, by enabling business partners, and by influencing industry peers and the broader policy landscape. Taking any of these steps will help drive progress for women in supply chains. However, we believe that those companies looking to create real and lasting change for women should adopt holistic approaches that tackle inequality at every level.  

What does that look like, and how can you put it into practice? 

Act 

As a company, you can act by integrating a gender lens into your supply chain strategy, supplier codes of conduct, due diligence approach, and sourcing practices. Taking these actions is a solid first step to ensuring that women workers are visible, the specific challenges they face are better identified, and remediation measures are being designed with gender specificities in mind. BSR has—with support from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs—produced two guidance documents to help you get started: the Gender Equality in Codes of Conduct Guidance and the Gender Equality in Social Auditing Guidance.  

Adding a gender lens to your due diligence processes has never been more important: In June 2019, the United Nations Guiding Principles (UNGPs) Working Group will present its report to the Human Rights Council on how to integrate gender more prominently into companies’ due diligence process, so that the business impacts of human rights abuses specifically related to women are better identified and addressed. 

Enable 

As a company, you can enable your business partners to develop stronger gender-sensitive management systems and inspire positive gender norms, either through collaborating with other companies to develop and pilot solutions or on a one-to-one basis with individual suppliers. As one example of what this can look like, BSR has worked with Lindex to develop its WE Women by Lindex program, and we are currently working with the Ethical Toy Program (ETP) to strengthen management systems with a range of toy manufacturers in India. Even when women have the knowledge and agency they need to make empowered choices, they may not be able to act on these choices because of workplace systems that provide inadequate support through pregnancy and maternity, hinder career advancement, or make it difficult to safely report any gender-sensitive grievances. 

Influence 

As a company, you can advocate for women’s empowerment and gender equality by joining a collaborative initiative with a strong influence agenda, such as Business Action for Women or HERproject. Through these efforts, you can work with your peers to raise your voice and advocate for change around systemic issues—the kind of issues that no individual company, or even a group of companies, can tackle in isolation. Changing unequal social norms, discriminatory legislation, or a lack of resources for women requires collaboration and a deeper engagement with governments, the development community, and grass-roots organizations.     

As expectations grow for companies to drive gender equality around the world, it is vital for companies to consider the wide range of opportunities to do so, from creating gender-sensitive corporate strategy to directly empowering women workers through peer educator training in factories and on farms.  

Are you ready to take your first step toward gender equality in supply chains or to engage more directly with the topic? Please contact our team of women’s empowerment experts. 

Blog | Tuesday November 13, 2018

Three Steps for Business to Connect Climate and Human Rights

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Historically, climate and human rights have been managed and addressed separately—governed by different policy frameworks, addressed by different communities of practice, managed by different tools, and treated in isolation.

But, as we’re starting to understand, climate change and human rights are intimately connected. The known impacts of climate change undermine a range of internationally recognized human rights, including the right to life, health, food, adequate standard of living, housing, property, and water. The absence of adequate protection for human rights exacerbates vulnerability to climate impacts, magnifying the risk faced by marginalized communities, who are disproportionately impacted by climate change.

Such marginalized communities are often at the heart of global supply chains. If their vulnerability increases, the strength and resilience of supply chains drops, leaving businesses exposed to operational risk. Forward-thinking businesses are considering ways to align climate and human rights policies to increase their resilience and that of affected communities.

Today, BSR is pleased to launch a new report that helps business to understand and accelerate this alignment. Our key message is that businesses should begin merging their understanding and management of the two issues, and view the risks and mitigation tactics as interrelated.

The actions taken by business to ensure access to human rights will mean that workers are able to protect their assets, recover quickly, and remain engaged in the workforce should a climate event take place. That’s good for workers, good for suppliers, and good for global brands.   

The actions taken by business to ensure access to human rights will mean that workers are able to protect their assets, recover quickly, and remain engaged in the workforce should a climate event take place.

The critical first step is to conduct due diligence to understand human rights and climate-related impacts as well as the scope of corporate responsibility to prevent harm. We propose a three-step approach to address the interactions of climate change and human rights in vulnerable communities, leveraging the due diligence framework established in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs):

1. Map where in a company’s operations, or in the operations of significant suppliers, the company is working within a climate-vulnerable community with weak realization of human rights, exacerbating the community’s vulnerability.
2. Determine the scope of responsibility through the lens of the UNGPs’ “cause, contribute, and directly linked” framework. Where a company’s operations, or the operations of a significant business partner, increase the vulnerability of communities facing climate-related risks, the company has an obligation to prevent the negative impact from occurring, or to engage with key business partners to do so.
3. Determine an appropriate remedy. We propose investment in capital assets, which have been shown to significantly improve a community’s resilience to climate change. Human rights provides an entry point into several types of capital assets, and companies can direct investments in these assets to strengthen human rights and thus strengthen climate resilience. In some cases, companies should consider going beyond “respect” and into the areas of strategic rights promotion and ecosystem change to leverage business resources to support people who are most susceptible to the negative impacts of climate change.

In conjunction with these actions, leading companies will adopt a policy clearly stating their corporate commitment to climate resilience and respect for human rights. They will also provide transparency and accountability: Improved disclosure and better-quality reporting of the financial risks and opportunities at the nexus of climate change and human rights will benefit companies’ relations with investors, stakeholders, and the public.

The nexus of climate change and human rights can seem intimidating, but there is opportunity in this space, too. Companies that go beyond their duty to respect human rights will likely realize returns on investment in the form of stronger and more resilient supply chains, in addition to the positive outcome of advancing human rights in vulnerable communities.

Businesses that act now to address the human rights implications of climate change can gain a long-term competitive advantage. To learn more about how to do so, read our new report, Climate and Human Rights: The Business Case for Action.

BSR’s climate and human rights nexus report is the fifth in our series, which also includes reports on the intersection between climate and supply chains, health, inclusive economy, and women’s empowerment. Stay tuned for more on the connections between climate resilience and a just transition to the low-carbon economy in the months to come.  

Reports | Tuesday November 13, 2018

Climate and Human Rights

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Climate change and human rights are intimately connected. The impacts of climate change undermine the realization of a range of internationally recognized human rights, including those dealing with life, health, food, adequate standard of living, housing, property, and water. The absence of adequate protection for human rights—particularly those that provide access to information, right to public participation in decision-making, and access to remedy—exacerbates vulnerability to climate impacts, magnifying the risk faced by the marginalized communities who are disproportionately impacted by climate change.

This paper demonstrates why and how business can act, including how to establish a deeper understanding of the nexus of climate change and human rights throughout the company as well as how businesses across sectors can articulate their risk and opportunities. It proposes operational principles to help companies identify, assess, prevent, mitigate, and remedy adverse climate change and human rights impacts.  

This report is part of a series of six climate nexus reports that cover human rights, inclusive economy, women’s empowerment, supply chain, just transition, and health.

Climate Nexus Report Series

Blog | Monday November 12, 2018

Reflections from the BSR Conference 2018

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Last week, our community of more than 800 sustainability leaders from the private, public, and nonprofit sectors came together in New York City at the BSR Conference 2018 to create a new blueprint for business.

To borrow a question that The Coca-Cola Company’s Beatriz Perez posed to the audience last week, “How do you run a business for the next quarter-century, as opposed to the next quarter?” This was a theme throughout the Conference, as we collectively grappled with how rapidly our operating environment is shifting and how radically different our future will look.  

How do you run a business for the next quarter-century, as opposed to the next quarter?

We tackled some of today’s most difficult but urgent subjects, including racial justice, power imbalances, and sexual harassment in the workplace. Our closing plenary speakers were New York Times investigative reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who, among countless other accomplishments, broke last year’s Harvey Weinstein story, helping ignite the #MeToo movement. They shared their thoughts with us on what comes next, both for the movement and the fight to advance gender equality in the workplace.

Plenaries and breakouts alike addressed the idea that business should engage with governments and increasingly needs to speak out on social and environmental issues: Author Anand Giridharadas urged participants to think about the policies their companies are lobbying for and against in Washington and how these efforts align—or don’t—with their sustainability efforts.

Technology was also top of mind, from John Ruggie’s remarks, where he referenced his work to translate the UNGPs into algorithms, to conversations about the human rights implications of artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the lessons of “techlash.” Participants rolled up their sleeves in futures thinking sessions to imagine the implications of technological advances like these for business.

Not least, results of the U.S. midterm elections made their way into several conversations; most notably the fact that more than 100 women were elected to Congress.

Here are five ways that you can re-live the highlights of the event—or catch the things you missed:

1. Watch plenary session videos: Almost every plenary session is now live on our YouTube channel, from David Schwimmer’s call for men to be a bigger part of the conversation around sexual harassment and power dynamics, to Novartis CEO Vasant Narasimhan’s talk about “bending the curve of life” through improving access to medicine through innovation.
2. Read about our latest initiatives: We launched a lot of new content last week. Check out our new report to help you increase the resilience of your business strategy, Doing Business in 2030: Four Possible Futures, and CoLab, our new incubator and accelerator of private-sector collaboration.
3. See the social media highlights: Follow @BSRnews, @bsrherproject, and BSR staff on Twitter, and see what you missed on the #BSR18 hashtag. You will also find photo highlights on our Instagram accounts, @bsrorg and @herprojectbsr.
4. Find yourself in photos: We’ve uploaded photos from the week onto our Flickr account—head on over to see whether we captured you, or your favorite moment, in our BSR18 album.
5. Share your thoughts: If you were with us in New York, please take a moment to complete the Conference survey (available in the mobile app under “Surveys”). If you weren’t there, you can always tweet at us or email us your perspective.

We are grateful to have had the opportunity to connect with all of you—our global community of change agents and thought leaders who are truly creating a more just and sustainable world through the work you do every day. It is so energizing for us to come together to discuss big issues, explore global challenges, and share stories from the front lines of our work to advance sustainability, and we’re already looking forward to seeing you next year at BSR19 in San Jose, California, November 12-14, 2019.

Blog | Wednesday November 7, 2018

Introducing CoLab

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While the world is changing for the better, in alignment with the ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it’s not changing anywhere near fast enough.

The IPCC recently released a report highlighting how the world has an increasingly small window to take the drastic action required to limit the devastating impacts of climate change. Analysis by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in 2017 suggested that there could be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. A report from Sisters for Change published in 2016 found that one in seven women garment workers has been raped or forced to commit a sexual act.

We need to do better. And we can. The world needs new partnerships of unprecedented scale and ambition between the private sector, governments, and civil society to create a future in which both societies and companies thrive.

The world needs new partnerships of unprecedented scale and ambition between the private sector, governments, and civil society to create a future in which both societies and companies thrive.

Today we are pleased to launch CoLab: BSR's incubator and accelerator of private-sector collaboration, mobilizing the collective power of business to solve some of the world’s biggest sustainability challenges. Driven by the collective ingenuity of business and stakeholders, CoLab ideates, designs, and scales collaborations that have transformational impacts.

With their reach, resources, capacity for innovation, and voice, companies can be a major driver of positive change. A unified and collective effort from business can create a step change in progress toward the SDGs.

Increased collaboration is good for societies, who benefit from the collective reach, resources, and voice of businesses working in common cause. And it is good for businesses, who can build more resilient supply chains, reduce costs and improve productivity, overcome systemic barriers, and enhance brand value.

BSR has been designing, implementing, and scaling business-led collaborations to achieve win-win solutions for over 25 years. For instance, the Maritime Anti-Corruption Network (MACN) contributed to regulatory reform in Argentinian ports, which reduces corruption risks and creates a more efficient trading environment; shipping companies in Clean Cargo have cut their carbon dioxide emissions by 35 percent per TEU-km since 2009; and HERproject has empowered more than 800,000 women in 14 countries with knowledge and skills related to health, financial inclusion, and gender equality.

CoLab will work by crowdsourcing a wide range of proposals for game-changing collaborations like these and developing the most promising. We are therefore calling on you—as businesses, NGOs, governments, foundations, or individuals—to take this opportunity to participate in a major, global incubation exercise. Through CoLab, you can engage with BSR’s global network of peer companies and thought leaders to ideate, design, and scale game-changing initiatives with transformational impacts. CoLab can help you take a vision for collaboration and turn it into reality. 

CoLab will operate according to four principles:

• Value to Business and Society: Prioritize issues that deliver business value as well as significant societal impact.
• Solutions that Motivate: Advance solutions that engage participants’ core business strategies and tap into their full range of assets—capabilities, ingenuity, knowledge, reputation, networks, and financial resources.
• Stakeholder Inclusion: Ensure collaborative solutions take into account stakeholder and rights-holder perspectives, as well as optimize impacts and mitigate risks for beneficiaries.
• Action Orientation: Select efforts that are actionable to deliver change and impact. Move fast, be prepared to adapt.

By following these four principles, we aim to create collaborations that can grow quickly by mobilizing a wide range of actors around critical topics.

We are inviting all of BSR’s stakeholders and any other interested parties to submit ideas now through the CoLab page. We look forward to collaborating with you through this and other ways.

Blog | Tuesday November 6, 2018

Is Your Business Ready for a Radically Different Future?

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With rapid automation putting millions out of work, a new “Humans First” movement emerges—determined to fight back. Saudi Arabia decides that emissions mitigation efforts are too slow to prevent severe climate disruption and announces plans to launch a risky geoengineering program, prompting threats of retaliation from other nations. The rate of Type 2 diabetes has dropped for the second year in a row, thanks to a powerful new health AI that guides consumers toward healthier behavior—and punishes those who make unhealthy choices.

None of these things have happened—yet. But what would it mean for your business if they did?

During times of rapid change, the greatest danger lies in being unable to imagine radically different futures.

BSR’s new report, Doing Business in 2030: Four Possible Futures, combines research with imagination to help you consider disruptive possibilities such as these. The report presents four scenarios describing alternate future contexts for business. These scenarios explore key factors that could reshape the world over the coming decade and describe how they might develop, interact, and transform.

From climate disruption to automation to artificial intelligence, these changes are rapid, complex, interconnected, uncertain, and nonlinear. They are creating an entirely new operating environment for business.

While the scenarios explore numerous factors reshaping the future, on a high level they are organized around two critical uncertainties: 1) whether the forces of centralization or decentralization prevail, and 2) whether we will stick with the current economic paradigm of endless growth and profit maximization or shift toward a new paradigm that views the purpose of the economy as providing for equitable prosperity on a healthy planet.

Each scenario, summarized briefly below, imagines different answers to those questions.

Scenario 1: A Tale of Two Systems

Automation and environmental disruption cause global turmoil. China promotes a vision of “prosperity, order, and sustainability” and draws emerging economies into its orbit. Western government and business leaders realize they need to radically reform the social contract if free market capitalism is to survive.

Scenario 2: Move Slow and Fix Things

Health concerns, misinformation scandals, and a global recession undermine trust. People become disillusioned with consumerism, big business, and social media. As more localized economies emerge, people rediscover the benefits of community, and a culture of healing starts to take root.

Scenario 3: Tribalism, Inc.

The notion that “all business is political” drives social, economic, and cultural fragmentation. New “tribes” emerge with profoundly different experiences of reality. As collective action becomes increasingly difficult, some of these tribes experiment with radical approaches to global challenges like climate change.

Scenario 4: Total Information Awareness 

Highly personalized AI companions become an essential part of everyday life. Concentrated networks of huge businesses leverage extreme data to provide affordable, effective, and seamless services. Privacy is gone and much work is automated away, but most people embrace the new reality.

Scenarios are neither predictions nor forecasts, and none of these will “come true” exactly as written (although elements of each are likely to happen). Instead, they are a tool to help us think differently—and to consider truly radical changes that escape the bounds of our current models. Rather than providing us with a single answer about the future—which would almost certainly be wrong—they enable us to embrace uncertainty and develop more robust and resilient strategies.

So, how should you use them?

First, suspend disbelief and immerse yourself in each of these worlds. Imagine it is 2030, and the scenario you’re reading accurately describes the world you inhabit. What would your life be like? Where do you live, what do you care about, and how do you spend your time? Use questions like these to develop an intuitive understanding of what these worlds would be like to live in.

Second, explore what new challenges and opportunities each of these worlds would present for your business and for sustainability, and consider how your company would need to operate differently in 2030 to address these. How has your supply chain changed? What new competitors have entered the market? Who are your employees, and how is their work different from today? What do your customers need, and how are you meeting those needs sustainably?

Finally, consider how you could make your company’s strategy more resilient to the entire set of scenarios. Are there any elements of your current strategy that would fail in one of these scenarios, but which could be reconsidered? Are there any no-regrets actions you could take that would work well across all the scenarios? What sorts of hedging strategies could you use to avoid risking everything on one big bet? Once you’ve identified the most promising strategic initiatives, consider what you’d have to start doing today to bring them to life.

Much of what characterizes our current reality—from highly accurate facial recognition technology to Brexit—was not so long ago considered unlikely or even crazy. Scenarios offer us a unique opportunity to step outside of the box for a moment and consider truly different possibilities. While nobody can predict the future, thinking about the ways things might evolve can help us make wiser choices today. During times of rapid change, the greatest danger lies in being unable to imagine radically different futures.

Business—and the well-being of people and the planet—depend on new strategies for the future that account for the profound changes underway and imagine transformative new opportunities to create a more just and sustainable world.

Reports | Tuesday November 6, 2018

Doing Business in 2030

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The operating environment for sustainable business is being radically transformed by a diverse set of powerful and complex interacting forces. From climate disruption to automation to artificial intelligence, these changes are rapidly creating an entirely new operating environment for business. Business—and the well-being of people and the planet—will depend on new strategies for the future that account for the profound changes underway and imagine transformative new opportunities to create a more just and sustainable world.

In conditions of rapid change, scenarios offer a powerful way to explore multiple distinct possibilities. Rather than predicting what the world will be, they provide stories of alternate futures that combine research into drivers of change, with informed speculation about how key uncertainties could play out.

Scenarios are not predictions or forecasts. The scenarios in this report are organized around two critical uncertainties: Will the forces of centralization or decentralization prevail? Will we stick with the current economic paradigm of endless growth and profit maximization, or will we shift toward a new paradigm that views the purpose of the economy as providing for equitable prosperity on a healthy planet?

Each scenario imagines how different answers to these questions might shape the future.

Blog | Monday November 5, 2018

Our Human Rights Impact Assessment of Facebook in Myanmar

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Today, Facebook has published the human rights impact assessment (HRIA) of the company’s presence in Myanmar that it engaged BSR to undertake earlier this year.

The question of how social media platforms can respect the freedom of expression rights of users while also protecting rightsholders from harm is one of the most pressing challenges of our time.

This challenge is even more testing in Myanmar, where the majority of the population is still developing the digital literacy required to navigate the complex world of information sharing online, and where a minority of users are seeking to use Facebook as a platform to undermine democracy and incite offline violence. The lack of rule of law and recent political, economic, and social history in Myanmar add to the challenging environment.

We didn’t want the HRIA to reproduce what was already known—so we asked ourselves, what can we do to help increase human rights protections in the future?

Last month, the UN Human Rights Council’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar concluded that serious crimes under international law have been committed by military and security forces that warrant criminal investigation and prosecution. The use of Facebook to spread anti-Muslim, anti-Rohingya sentiment featured prominently in the Mission’s report.

In this context, the commissioning of this comprehensive HRIA is an important new milestone in business efforts to undertake due diligence and respect human rights. Facebook’s decision to publish the report in unredacted form also demonstrates an impressive commitment to transparency and sets an example for other companies to follow.

The challenging human rights context for Facebook and questions about the company’s response have been well-documented by international bodies, civil society organizations, and the media. Given this context, we didn’t want the HRIA to reproduce what was already known—so we asked ourselves, what can we do to help increase human rights protections in the future?

At the basic level, addressing this question meant thoroughly applying the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to the letter—identifying and prioritizing Facebook’s actual and potential human rights impacts and making recommendations for how to address them.

However, we concluded that answering this question would require us to be disciplined in two very important ways.

First, it was essential to take an inclusive approach. We consulted directly with over 60 potentially affected rightsholders and stakeholders during two visits to Myanmar by BSR staff, and we made sure that we spoke to as diverse a range of voices as we were able to in the time available. This approach generated very important insights. While many stakeholders—and Facebook itself—emphasized that Facebook’s efforts have fallen short in the past, we witnessed a strong determination from everyone we spoke with, inside and outside Facebook, to address human rights in Myanmar as a matter of utmost importance and urgency. We are hopeful about collaborative efforts, both now and over the long-term.

Second, it was essential to take a distinctly forward-looking approach. Understanding the mistakes and shortcomings of the past established crucial context, but it was important that we focused on forward-looking analysis and recommendations.

This approach led to us make recommendations in five main areas. These recommendations are shaped by the observation that Facebook’s human rights impacts in Myanmar cannot be addressed by Facebook alone, but also require system-wide change:

1. Governance and accountability at Facebook, including human rights policies, formalized governance structures, and public communications.
2. Community standards enforcement by Facebook, such as continuing to build a cross-functional team that understands the local Myanmar context, as well as a stricter implementation of Facebook’s credible violence policy and further development of artificial intelligence solutions that support human decision-making.
3. Engagement, trust, and transparency, such as publishing a local, Myanmar-specific version of Facebook’s Community Standards Enforcement Report and supporting international mechanisms created to investigate violations of international human rights.
4. System-wide change, including advocacy efforts aimed at policy, legal, and regulatory reform and continued investment in efforts to increase digital literacy and counter hate speech.
5. Risk mitigation and opportunity enhancement, such as preparations for the 2020 elections in Myanmar and for the possibility that WhatsApp becomes more commonly used, as well as the development of new products and services that accelerate growth of the digital economy in Myanmar.

Facebook’s blog to accompany the publication of the HRIA described in some detail the company’s stance and current status for each of these five areas.

We believe that the implementation of these recommendations is far more important than the HRIA itself. For this reason, we hope that the publication of the HRIA in full provides three main benefits: first, to provide a clear action plan for Facebook; second, to increase awareness of the human rights approaches available to Facebook and other technology companies engaged in Myanmar; and third, to stimulate further dialogue, collaboration, and solutions.

The report was made possible thanks to the many stakeholders and rightsholders in Myanmar who participated in the assessment process. We encourage everyone interested in the human rights situation in Myanmar to read the report in full, and we look forward to updates from Facebook in the future on its progress implementing the recommendations.