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Blog | Wednesday April 20, 2022

Four Ways to Advance Mental Well-Being in the Workplace

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As employees gain some respite from the pandemic through the protection offered by vaccines, the mental health issues exacerbated by the pandemic persist among American workers, particularly low-income and frontline workers. In our 2021 blog post on workers’ mental health and our corresponding Roadmap to Promote Mental Well-Being and Resilience, we note that mental health has been a rising concern in the US over the last decade. In fact, it has become such an important public health issue that its impact on the US population—especially in the context of equitable access to mental health services through employment—must be addressed. 

BSR’s new report, “Tailoring Mental Health Efforts for Low-Income and Frontline Workers,” identifies concrete measures that employers can take to protect the mental health of essential workers.

“Mental health is an integral part of health; indeed, there is no health without mental health.”

—World Health Organization

Workers have experienced increasing levels of stress due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Employers often recognize that these challenges negatively impact productivity, absenteeism, and turnover. Despite this, many businesses are still at the stage of determining the mix of mental health offerings to meet the varying needs of an entire diverse workforce, including those of low-income and frontline workers. BSR’s Healthy Business Coalition, in partnership with One Mind at Work, has determined key aspects of an effective workforce mental health program that meets the needs of diverse groups and ensures health equity and inclusion.

The Role of Business

While many employers have begun to respond by deepening investments in workplace mental health and advancing culture change, their efforts are not universal, nor have they led to enough impact for frontline and low-income workers. 71 percent of employers with frontline employees rate themselves as supporting mental health well or very well, but only 27 percent of frontline employees agree.

Why Frontline and Low-Income Workers?

Businesses have made progress on addressing the mental health issues of the average employee. Even so, the needs of frontline and low-income workers are not like those of the average employee. Low-income and essential workers are more likely to experience depression and anxiety. They face time and resource constraints, and their job functions often result in increased stress levels. Essential workers often fear discriminatory treatment and job insecurity if they speak up. Given their circumstances, it is critical that low-income and frontline workers can access corporate mental health offerings. 

Four Ways Employers Can Advance the Mental Well-Being and Resilience of Employees

1. Embed Mental Health into the Organizational Culture

• Develop a holistic mental health response to reach all employee populations.
• Examine how current ways of working can exacerbate risk factors for poor mental health. 
• Approach mental health as a collective priority rather than placing responsibility for action on the individual.
• Build organization-wide policies and programs that tackle stigma and build empathy, such as mental health teams and formal accountability mechanisms.

2. Connect a Broad Continuum of Solutions Rather than a “One-Size-Fits-All” Approach

• Recognize that the mental health support resources offered to corporate executives may not meet the needs of low-income and frontline workers.
• Provide an array of approaches that match employee preferences, needs, and access points, such as providing services to those without access to a computer.
• Provide the flexibility for employees to engage based on their own preferences, schedules, and experiences.

3. Find and Integrate the Right Digital Tools

• Offer virtual behavior health services (known for being flexible and affordable) to low-income and frontline workers.
• Provide digital mental health tools to help address geographic, cultural, network, cost, and time constraints. 
• Find what works specifically for your employees and embed those solutions into a broader mental health strategy.

4. Equip Leaders to Be Active Players

• Empower leaders at all levels with authority, resources, and training to shape an organizational culture that recognizes and supports mental health.
• Provide additional education to line managers on how to support low-income and frontline workers.

Opportunities for Business

The work environment is a major social determinant of health. Companies are directly impacted by the health of their workforce and are uniquely positioned to improve their mental well-being. We encourage companies to make mental health a business imperative and prioritize the mental health of their most marginalized and high-risk employees. 

At the Healthy Business Coalition, we are interested in understanding your company’s primary concerns and challenges facing mental health in the workplace. We can work with you to review current practices and initiatives with the goal of sharing best practices and spurring collective action. We encourage you to reach out with any questions or to find out how to get involved.

Reports | Wednesday April 20, 2022

Human Rights Roadmap for Transforming Finance

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The financial services industry—from asset owners and managers to private equity, venture capital, and banks—has a catalytic effect on the behavior of business and the economy. Its vast range of financial products, services, and client relationships ripples through every industry, value chain, and transaction.

With this backdrop, the industry has enormous potential to create a global economy that puts people’s lives and the health of the planet at the center, while contributing to the realization of the United Nations UN Sustainable Development Goals. Yet efforts to do so must be grounded in an evolved approach to doing business—one that respects human rights, in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). 

In the "Human Rights Roadmap for Transforming Finance" report, BSR provides an overview of key areas where the industry must make progress to tackle global challenges and contribute to new financial systems that respect human rights. We highlight the materiality of human rights for financial institutions (FIs) and explain that adopting a human rights approach to finance can strengthen the impact of traditional environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices. In particular, the report elaborates on the call to action set out in the UNGPs 10+ Roadmap for the next decade of business and human rights for FIs—from adapting core business and driving respect for human rights in financial markets to engaging with people affected by FI value chains and ensuring that victims of harm have access to remedy. The report concludes with next steps for transforming finance.

Blog | Tuesday April 19, 2022

Navigating Emerging Ethical Issues: Lessons from Bioethics, Tech, and Human Rights

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The healthcare sector has constantly grappled with ethical questions at the cutting edge of regulation. This is often the case in the field of bioethics—the study of and response to the moral and ethical questions arising from the research, development, sale, and clinical use of pharmaceutical and healthcare products and associated technologies. How far should we go to save someone’s life? Is it fair to experiment on certain groups of people? Established principles and rules on bioethics (e.g., autonomy, beneficence, informed consent), together with a growing body of industry guidelines, have helped companies to navigate these questions. 

However, the exponential speed of research and biotechnology development presents healthcare companies with ever more complex ethical questions. This challenge has been amplified by the convergence between healthcare and data, technology, as well as growing public scrutiny of the corporate response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

To effectively identify and manage arising issues, companies need robust policies, governance structures and risk management processes—as well as a strong organizational culture. 

A human rights-based approach provides a strong foundation for addressing ethical issues. Drawing on BSR’s work with healthcare and tech companies, and our expertise in applying human rights frameworks to businesses’ ethical challenges, this blog shares some insights on best practices for managing emerging ethical issues in a corporate context.

The Challenge of Uncertainty

What do we mean by emerging ethical issues? This could be any decision or activity that raises new ethical questions of “right and wrong” and challenges a company to define “what kind of company are we?”  Are we comfortable enabling an elderly person’s loved ones to always track their location? Should we pursue a marketing strategy even if it excludes certain people?

Such emerging ethical issues have common characteristics: the actual or potential impacts are not well or fully understood, and regulation and existing policies don’t provide all the answers. The public may not even know yet where it stands, as we’ve seen recently on the question of vaccinating children against COVID-19 or deploying facial recognition in public spaces. Caught between the precautionary principle (“stop until we know it’s safe”) and the pressure to innovate—and with limited time to decide in the face of exponential change—companies must find a way to navigate ethical uncertainty. 

Lead with “Tone from the Top” and Inspire “Bottom-Up” Engagement  

Leadership is essential to set a company’s ambition beyond legal compliance and drive required action. But this is most effective when combined with the engagement of employees, who will need to identify and address emerging ethical issues on a day-to-day basis. We’ve seen the positive impact of CEOs addressing employees directly and honestly on a company’s challenges and building employees’ ethical “muscle” memory via internal “ambassador” networks and informal group discussions on ethical topics.

Healthcare companies—and other companies adopting mission-driven purposes—have the advantage that their employees and leaders tend to be motivated by the company’s societal mission and thus predisposed to engaging on emerging ethical issues. Seize it.

Adopt a Cross-Functional Approach

Emerging ethical issues, especially where healthcare and tech are concerned, do not fit neatly within the defined lines of corporate functions. A new medical device may raise questions about data ethics, public policy around access to healthcare, and end-of-life disposal. A cross-functional approach is required to ensure companies approach emerging ethical issues in an informed way that benefits from multiple perspectives. 

Leading healthcare and tech companies do this well by convening a range of expert voices on their external bioethics advisory committees (including philosophers, theologists, and sociologists) or organizing internal working groups that bring together different functions (e.g., compliance, privacy, research and development, human rights) to identify and discuss appropriate responses to potential emerging ethical issues across the business.

Anchor in Enterprise Risk Frameworks 

Companies should consider their “ethics and compliance” risks in a proactive and future-looking way and include emerging ethical issues (that may not yet present legal or compliance risks) into their enterprise risk management (ERM) frameworks. Although we are seeing progress toward ERM frameworks integrating “ethical” risks to people and the planet beyond legal compliance risks, there is still a ways to go.

In practice, anchoring responsibility for emerging ethical issues in business ethics and compliance functions can enable greater reach and impact across the company by leveraging the established relationships, governance structures, and engagement resources of these risk management functions. A strong and strategically minded ethics and compliance function can also help raise awareness around emerging ethical issues at executive and board levels.

Be Open and Engage External Perspectives

Transparency and open engagement with external experts and stakeholders lead to more informed and accountable positions that avoid groupthink. Advisory boards with external experts are a common feature of healthcare companies and have inspired the development of digital ethics boards in tech companies. It is important to bring independent expertise and external perspectives into a company’s decision-making process, which can also be achieved through ad hoc bilateral engagement with experts and/or through industry and multistakeholder collaborations. 

A recent BSR project revealed that healthcare companies don’t talk about their bioethics challenges externally in the open way we’ve increasingly seen on other environmental and social topics. Tech companies have learned the hard way and are now showing signs of greater transparency regarding what dilemmas they face and how they are resolving them. Healthcare and other companies would do well not to wait for a similar crisis in trust to pivot to a more open culture—as the COVID-19 response has prompted some to do already. 

To maximize the benefits of healthcare and new technologies for society, companies will need strong governance structures and organizational culture to identify and address emerging ethical dilemmas as they arise. The insights in this blog should help build a more resilient business in today’s rapidly changing context, as well as meet growing regulatory and stakeholder expectations on managing social and environmental impacts.

Reports | Tuesday April 19, 2022

Tailoring Mental Health Efforts for Low-Income and Frontline Workers

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As employees gain some respite from the pandemic through the protection offered by vaccines, the mental health issues that were exacerbated by the pandemic persist among American workers. 

BSR’s latest report “Tailoring Mental Health Efforts for Low-Income and Frontline Workers” reflects on key learnings from convenings held by BSR’s Healthy Business Coalition and One Mind at Work. Our members discussed how employers have effectively advanced mental well-being and resilience for their most at-risk employees. 

Key ways business can advance the mental well-being and resilience of employees include: 

• Connecting a broad continuum of solutions
• Finding and integrating the right digital tools
• Embedding mental health into the organizational culture
• Equipping leaders to be active players in building a “healthy business”

At the Healthy Business Coalition, we are interested in understanding your company’s primary concerns and challenges facing mental health in the workplace. We can work with you to review current practices and initiatives with the goal of sharing best practices and spurring collective action. We encourage you to reach out with any questions or to find out how to get involved.

Blog | Thursday April 7, 2022

Rapid Human Rights Due Diligence During Political and Armed Conflict: A Business Response to Ukraine

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BSR is making publicly available a rapid human rights due diligence tool to help with quick decision-making in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine presents the most high-stakes situation for the country since it broke from the Soviet Union in 1991. Russia is acting in violation of international law, international humanitarian law, and a host of international agreements, and it is committing serious abuses of fundamental human rights. As previously acknowledged, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also raises significant questions for business and illuminates the impact that its actions can have during times of political and armed conflict.

As countries and international organizations are taking rapid actions, both independently and in concert (most significantly by denouncing Russian aggression and imposing hefty economic sanctions), companies operating globally have also acted swiftly. At present, around 500 companies have halted operations in Russia and taken other actions to respond to the invasion. 

While it is becoming more common to see corporate actors exiting Russia or taking other actions in response to the invasion, civil society has started to question how companies are implementing international human rights standards for business while taking such actions. Notable examples include an analysis by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre assessing business and human rights in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and an article by Human Rights Watch on how tech companies should prioritize rights in Ukraine.

In our work with member companies on the subject of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, BSR has provided several specific recommendations, and in particular the need to conduct heightened human rights due diligence. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) expect companies to identify and assess actual or potential adverse human rights impacts and to take appropriate action to address them. Under normal circumstances, companies have weeks, months, or even years to complete due diligence. However, this is not the case during political and armed conflict. 

BSR previously developed a rapid human rights due diligence tool to help with quick decision-making in response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, using the UNGPs and the various human rights principles, standards, and methodologies upon which the UNGPs were built. The tool has been updated to account for the outbreak of political and armed conflict in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The latest version reflects BSR’s guidance on how to conduct heightened human rights due diligence in conflict-affected and high-risk contexts, insights surrounding the business response, and recommendations to member companies.  

The repercussions of the invasion on business are massive, including immediate to long-term implications on climate and energy transition, global supply chains, economies and geopolitics, and healthcare, as well as on the global financial system, democracy, and corporate citizenship. Russia's invasion of Ukraine also heightens human rights risks for business with operations, supply chains, customers, and users in the region, with concerns including:

• Whether it would be responsible to continue operating in the environment, and how to responsibly exit the region if presence is no longer tenable. 
• In what circumstances a corporate leader should address a political situation, and how such activism (or a lack thereof) might impact employee mental well-being, safety, or security. 
• How to have positive impacts on the human rights of Ukrainian staff members and the broader community and how to support Russian employees to exercise their freedom of expression by engaging in protest.
• How to go above legal compliance to address human rights concerns.

The BSR rapid human rights due diligence tool guides companies through human rights due diligence in urgent scenarios. The tool also makes specific reference to various standards from international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

While recognizing the horror of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, BSR also acknowledges claims by human rights advocates of the hypocrisy of media coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine as compared with other conflicts. BSR intends for this tool to also be used in other instances of political and armed conflict, without discrimination.

Download the Tool

Case Studies | Thursday April 7, 2022

Blockchain in Brazil and Sustainable Supply Chains

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Large companies involved in global commodity markets with extensive supply chains and complex procurement systems regulated by multiple-tier trading schemes, often lack visibility beyond their tier one suppliers. The complexity of value chains is exacerbated by this opacity, limiting transparency on the sources of the components and inputs that make up their products, as well as potential areas of risk associated with sustainability concerns.

Emerging technologies such as blockchain can solve ongoing challenges within supply chains. Supply chain networks are often complex, siloed and operate with several disconnections from their management and procurement systems, leading to an overall lack of visibility between actors. Blockchain technology offers a method of data-sharing that allows for the continuation of claims whilst enabling data privacy and trust between actors.

This short case study describes the context and objectives of the blockchain project, as well as the analysis process of the three companies’ supply chains, the technical solutions identified, and conclusions of the feasibility study.

Download the Case Study

Blog | Wednesday April 6, 2022

BSR at 30: A New Strategy for Impact

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As BSR celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, we see opportunities to achieve our mission like never before, in a world that is facing many urgent challenges. 

In this context, we have updated our strategy over the past year. Our new 2025 strategy builds on three decades of experience and achievement and will enable us to maximize impact and accelerate progress toward our mission of building a just and sustainable world, at a time when translating ambition into action is urgently needed, and more possible. We are delighted to share it with our 300+ member companies, as well as our many partners from civil society, philanthropy, and indeed the wider world that shares our vision of a world in which all people can thrive on a healthy planet.

This is a time when just and sustainable business is more indispensable to business leaders than ever before. 

If we have learned anything from the turbulence of the last two years, it is how essential it is for business to develop resilient business strategies. We also know in clear terms how essential it is for business to take decisive action to address the climate crisis and deliver truly inclusive economic progress in equitable societies.

In developing our approach, we have spoken with many of our member companies and other experts in the field. It is absolutely clear that just and sustainable business is now firmly mainstream; even more, it is understood as an essential ingredient in business success and indispensable for tackling the world’s primary challenges. It is equally clear that companies continue to search for the answers that enable exponential progress, with credible, demonstrable impact.

Our Objectives

Through our 2025 strategy, we will be focusing our energies on the major challenges of our time:

• Decisive action to shift to a net-zero economy that preserves nature 
• Inclusive, equitable economies based on social justice and human rights 
• Responsible use of technology to advance socially beneficial innovation, and
• Business transformation to achieve these goals

We will pursue these objectives by expanding our agenda and offerings, emphasizing impact, and building a growing global team.

What We’re Doing: An Expanded Agenda  

In addition to our existing commitments to human rights, climate, equity, inclusion and justice, and sustainability management, we are investing in effort to achieve progress on social justice, ESG governance, and nature. The time is right to ensure that corporate governance evolves to meet 21st-century challenges. To ensure that business commitments are translated into real action to advance social justice, later this spring we will be launching a new Center for Business and Social Justice. And we will be augmenting our efforts to address climate by expanding our work with our members on business and nature.

How We’re Doing It: An Emphasis on Impact

We are focusing our efforts on achieving impact with three principles that guide our work. We aim for impact in everything we do. We build connections between issues, and between business and society, and we provide candid guidance that enables credible solutions. 

Who We Are: A Growing Global Team of Sustainability Experts

Our strategy rests on building an even more talented, diverse, and global team. We aim to exceed 200 colleagues for the first time in 2022, with an expanded international presence in Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Washington, DC—to deliver for our growing cohort of member companies around the world, creating value for business and society. 

In the months ahead, hopefully as in-person gatherings return to enable the personal connections that build creative solutions, we will share more of our thinking. We also are eager to hear from you on how to make the most of our joint opportunity, and to create the collaborative solutions the world so badly needs.

Our world appears seriously broken today. We are facing many interconnected and profound challenges. We approach the next few years confident that strengthened commitments to just and sustainable business can turn the tide. We also see the promise of fundamental change that can build—and rebuild—a world that is truly equitable, sustainable, and innovative. We intend to do all we can, working with you, to deliver on that promise.

Reports | Monday April 4, 2022

Human Rights Impact Assessment on Meta’s Expansion of End-to-End Encryption

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Blog | Monday April 4, 2022

A Human Rights Assessment of Meta’s Expansion of End-to-End Encryption

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In October 2019, Meta commissioned BSR to undertake a human rights assessment of extending end-to-end encryption across Meta’s messaging services. Today we are delighted to publish both the full assessment and an executive summary and thank all the stakeholders, experts, and participants at Meta for their contribution.

Meta’s public response to the assessment indicates that the company intends to implement the majority of our recommendations while continuing to explore the feasibility of several others.

Many of the human rights impacts associated with end-to-end encrypted messaging are system-wide and whole of society issues that exist beyond end-to-end encryption, so cannot be addressed by Meta alone. We hope that publishing this assessment makes a constructive contribution to collaborative efforts dedicated to human rights-based approaches for end-to-end encrypted messaging services.

The full assessment requires extensive reading—over 100 pages—so we would like to summarize a few key points for readers. First, we believe that a human rights-based approach can bring much needed nuance to the debate around encryption. Today’s encryption debate often pits two opposing groups against each other, with privacy on one side and security on the other. However, the reality is complex, with privacy and security concerns on both sides, and many other human rights that are impacted both positively and negatively. In this assessment, we considered impacts on all human rights, assessed the connectivity between rights, and emphasized the interests of vulnerable groups.

Second, end-to-end encryption is increasingly important to protect human rights, especially in the context of rising digital authoritarianism, increasingly sophisticated digital security threats, and the growth of sensitive communications online. This is especially important for human rights defenders, journalists, political activists, women, children, refugees, migrants, and members of the LGBTQI+ community. Furthermore, privacy and security while using online platforms should not only be a privilege of the technically savvy, but something that is democratized and available to everyone—a factor that is especially important in the context of Meta’s more than 2.8 billion users.

Third, expanding end-to-end encryption across Meta’s messaging platforms will address adverse human rights impacts arising from today’s absence of ubiquitous end-to-end encryption and result in the increased realization of a diverse range of human rights; including privacy, physical safety, freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of religion and belief, freedom of assembly and association, access to remedy, and participation in government.

Fourth, end-to-end encryption can make the human rights risks of messaging platforms more difficult to detect, such as child sexual abuse and exploitation, hate speech, harmful mis/disinformation, human trafficking, illicit goods sales, and terrorism and violent extremism. BSR provides advice in the assessment on how to address these risks, including recommendations for products (e.g., reporting channels), process (e.g., detecting behavioral signals), product policy (e.g., community standards), and public policy (e.g., advocacy and law enforcement relationships).

A key debate exists today around whether certain technical solutions should be used to proactively detect problematic content, such as child sexual abuse material on end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms. These solutions are generally referred to as “client-side scanning,” and leverage a user’s device to scan for the presence of certain harmful content and report that content to third parties such as the messaging service provider or law enforcement.

Here we conclude that the deployment of client-side scanning technologies as they exist today should not be pursued, as doing so would undermine the cryptographic integrity of end-to-end encryption and constitute a disproportionate restriction on privacy and a range of other human rights. We also conclude that theoretical approaches to client-side scanning in the context of a messaging service that are not feasible with current technology, such as homomorphic encryption, would also pose important human rights risks that would need to be explored and adequately addressed before any implementation.

However, we make recommendations of alternative measures that can be used to address child safety risks, including a holistic child rights strategy that encompasses user reporting and education, data analysis, and behavioral signals, among many other elements.

It is here that BSR and Meta reach a slightly different view. BSR recommends continued research into client-side scanning in search of methods that can preserve cryptographic integrity and achieve child rights goals in a manner consistent with the principles of necessity, proportionality, and non-discrimination (i.e., continued due diligence), while Meta believes that any form of client-side scanning is fundamentally incompatible with an end-to-end encrypted messaging service. However, we believe that both positions are reasonable and defensible on human rights grounds and note that Meta and BSR are in firm agreement that client-side scanning should not be deployed today.

This human rights assessment, and the mix of risks and opportunities it has surfaced, has been fraught with ethical challenges, complex dilemmas, and difficult human rights tensions for which there are no easy answers. The world is moving in a direction where end-to-end encryption is becoming increasingly essential for the protection of human rights, and we hope that this assessment makes a significant contribution to how rights-respecting approaches to the deployment of end-to-end encryption can take shape.

Blog | Tuesday March 22, 2022

Bridging the Human Rights Gap in ESG

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Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing has seen a sharp increase in recent years, with 10 percent of worldwide fund assets currently invested in ESG-labeled funds and ESG assets on track to exceed US$50 trillion by 2025. The rise of ESG represents progress on global sustainability action, and it serves as a blaring market signal to investors, companies, and regulators on the importance of managing business impacts on people and the planet.

The ESG trend should come as no surprise—the global pandemic exacerbated existing inequalities and drove companies to reexamine human capital across global value chains. The harmful impacts of climate change, threats to democratic systems, restrictions on civic freedoms, and persistent attacks against human rights and environmental defenders have all increased legal, operational, and reputational risks for business.

While the growth of ESG is a positive development, ESG as a framework does not sufficiently capture harms to people (and resulting risk to business) or guide decisions that take human rights into account. ESG can easily fail to identify and address notable human rights harms. Investors will only realize the potential of sustainable investing if they fully embrace a core concept for corporate sustainability—the responsibility to respect human rights.

Respect for human rights is a global standard of expected conduct whereby businesses, including financial actors, take proactive steps to avoid negative impacts and enable remedy for victims of harm. Human rights are universal, cutting across civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental issues (e.g., privacy, housing, and a healthy environment), not a subset of niche social topics (e.g., child labor and human trafficking). Crucially, human rights are inalienable and should be upheld regardless of their value for business success.

Human rights are inalienable and should be upheld regardless of their value for business success.

Misalignment between ESG practices—whether grounded in financial risk management, values alignment, or ambitions of positive impact—and respect for human rights is increasingly evident. In 2021, companies implicated in serious human rights abuses in Asia and Africa were included in key ESG indices and funds. Institutions with strong rhetoric on human rights also lent money to regimes responsible for severe human rights violations, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Russia, and Belarus. This phenomenon extends to climate change, which has profound impacts on human rights—72 out of 130 climate-themed funds were not aligned with the Paris Agreement in 2021. Yet even alignment with the Paris Agreement does not guarantee respect for all internationally recognized human rights.

The renewable energy sector—popular among ESG funds—is a clear example. Since 2010, BHRRC has tracked over 200 allegations of abuse associated with renewable energy projects, including land grabs, dangerous working conditions, poverty wages, impacts on Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and attacks on human rights defenders. Achieving net-zero emissions also requires an expansion of transitional mineral production, yet the Transition Minerals Tracker revealed that the biggest producers of six key minerals face numerous allegations of human rights abuse, including harms to the environment, communities, and workers.

While renewable energy is essential for tackling climate change—and rightly a priority for ESG investment—the transition will not be sustainable unless human rights are respected.

While renewable energy is essential for tackling climate change—and rightly a priority for ESG investment—the transition will not be sustainable unless human rights are respected. A growing number of solar and wind projects are being cancelled due to community opposition, including in Australia, North America, and Europe, and renewable energy supply chains are increasingly under regulatory scrutiny.

In June 2021, the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights (UNWG) found that while investors increasingly recognize their human rights responsibilities and engage companies on rights issues, knowledge of what human rights are, how they relate to ESG factors, and what respecting them means for doing business remains limited. The UNWG cites data indicating that members of the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), which commit to incorporating ESG issues in their investment activities, mostly vote against social and environmental shareholder proposals, including human rights proposals. Private equity firms were found to be especially lagging on human rights. Meanwhile, Amnesty International found the majority of the world’s most important venture capital firms did not consider the human rights harms of their investment decisions.

Addressing negative human rights impacts as a core element of sustainable investing requires companies and financial actors to focus on the risks they pose to people by conducting robust human rights due diligence, aligned with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. It involves integrating international human rights standards across corporate reporting frameworks, benchmarks, and other ESG data and research products. It means engaging people affected by investment value chains—including critical voices—and being accountable when people are harmed.

There have been positive steps in this direction. A growing number of investors are adopting human rights commitments, integrating human rights criteria and approaches in screening processes, and communicating their expectations that portfolio companies and clients conduct due diligence. Policymakers and reporting frameworks are also starting to redefine the concept of materiality to include risks to people and planet. Civil society is taking an increasingly active role in the ESG landscape—working alongside investors to promote human rights and holding them accountable for failing to respect them.

This blog series will explore these signs of change and opportunities for financial actors to help reshape the behavior of business in the global economy, contributing to a world where people and the planet are at the core of economic development. Throughout 2022, this series will bring together diverse voices from civil society, investors, companies, and academia to explore how to strengthen ESG practices to ensure truly responsible and rights-respecting business conduct.