Project

Environmental and social risks of agricultural trade flows

The EU has developed various types of supply chain legislations to prevent negative impacts, and support climate neutrality and sustainable development goals. Companies are required to identify, assess, report on and address environmental and social risks and impacts in their operations, supply chains, and business relationships. We are working on a four-year project to continue developing risk scores for assessing the environmental and social risks of agricultural trade flows.

15 risks for multiple sectors on sub-national levels

We aim to present the risk prevalence of 15 human rights and environmental risk themes for at least 15-20 agricultural sectors at national and sub-national levels. These scores are presented in a dashboard and create a high-level overview of the risks and potential adverse impacts related to a company’s area of operation. It thereby covers a first step within the due diligence approach, enabling a prioritisation of the most salient risks in a company’s supply chain for further assessment. The methodology had been continuously improved since its first version from 2020, is based on latest scientific insights, and covers all relevant environmental and human rights risks themes, aligned with the OECD guidelines, UNGPs and key legislative provisions in the CSRD, EUDR, and CS3D.

Human rights risks

For human rights risks, we incorporate 8 risks:

  • Child labour
  • Discrimination
  • Forced labour
  • Freedom of association and collective bargaining
  • (Lack of) occupational health and safety
  • (Violation of) indigenous peoples’ rights
  • Insufficient remuneration
  • Violence and harassment

We use publicly available data sources and statistical approaches to estimate (sub-)national risk levels for each theme, combined with a standardised literature study on different agricultural sectors in order to account for the specific risks associated with the production of a specific commodity within a specific country.

Environmental risks

For environmental risks, we assess 7 different risks:

  • Deforestation (land use change)
  • Biodiversity loss
  • Water stress
  • Global warming
  • Eutrophication
  • Acidification
  • Ecotoxicity

Deforestation, biodiversity loss and water stress are assessed using a spatial analysis, which uses the spatial patterns in production areas and combines them with spatial maps related to each theme, while LCA provides relative risk scores based on absolute environmental impacts, such as CO2 emissions.

Join us

We look forward to collaborate with experts of governments, private sector and non-profit organisations, in order to reduce human rights and environmental impacts in global supply chains. Please feel free to reach out to us for any potential collaboration or for more specific questions on our methodology.