• Navigate
    • About
    • Understanding Impacts
      • Understanding the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation
      • Impacts on People
      • UN Guiding Principles and Corporate Water Stewardship
    • Respect in Practice
      • Develop a Policy Commitment
      • Assess Impacts on the HRWS
      • Integrate and Take Action
      • Track and Communicate Performance
      • Remediation and Grievance Mechanisms
    • Supporting Human Rights
    • Resources
      • Diagnostic Questions
      • Glossary
      • Human Rights and Corporate Water Stewardship
      • Specific Sections of the Guidance
      • Standards and Instruments Related to the HRWS
  • Download Full Report (PDF)
UN Global Compact | Pacific Institute
Mailing List
Publications
  • Corporate Water Disclosure Guidelines (2014)
  • Exploring the Business Case for Sanitation
  • Shared Water Challenges and Interests
  • Understanding "Sufficiency" in Water-Related Collective Action
  • Corporate Water Accounting
  • Guide to Managing Integrity in Water Stewardship Initiatives (2015)
  • Respecting the Human Rights to Water & Sanitation (2015)
  • Guide to Setting Site Water Targets Informed by Catchment Context
  • Guide to Responsible Business Engagement with Water Policy (2010)
  • Understanding Key Water Stewardship Terms
  • Guide to Water-Related Collective Action (2013)
  • Water Resilience Coalition
Tools & Websites
  • Water Action Hub
  • WASH4Work
  • Natural Resources Risk & Action Framework
  • Water Resilience Assessment Framework
  • Benefit Accounting of Nature-Based Solutions for Watersheds
Respecting the Human Rights to Water & Sanitation (2015)Respecting the Human Rights to Water & Sanitation (2015)
  • Navigate
    • About
    • Understanding Impacts
      • Understanding the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation
      • Impacts on People
      • UN Guiding Principles and Corporate Water Stewardship
    • Respect in Practice
      • Develop a Policy Commitment
      • Assess Impacts on the HRWS
      • Integrate and Take Action
      • Track and Communicate Performance
      • Remediation and Grievance Mechanisms
    • Supporting Human Rights
    • Resources
      • Diagnostic Questions
      • Glossary
      • Human Rights and Corporate Water Stewardship
      • Specific Sections of the Guidance
      • Standards and Instruments Related to the HRWS
  • Download Full Report (PDF)

Assess Impacts on the HRWS

  • Home
  • Respect in Practice
  • Assess Impacts on the HRWS

Assess Impacts on the HRWS

Core Concepts

  • In addition to understanding the company’s water-related risks from a business perspective, water stewards are increasingly expected to understand the risks that the company’s operations pose to affected stakeholders. A human rights lens clearly focuses attention on risk to people.
  • Assessing impacts means gathering the information needed to understand a company’s actual and potential impacts on the HRWS. Meaningful engagement with affected stakeholders is essential to understand how the company’s operations may have negative impacts on people.
  • Companies need to review their existing assessment systems to determine if they can be used to identify actual and potential impacts on the HRWS, and if not, how these functional gaps can be addressed.
  • A human rights lens uses the severity of the impact on affected stakeholders to prioritize issues for attention by the company, where prioritization is necessary. Those impacts may be at a company’s own facility or elsewhere in its value chain.

 

Key Term: Relevant Business Activities

Key Steps

A. Assess How the Company May Be Involved in Impacts on the HRWS

1. Understand Who May Be Impacted by the Company’s Activities

A company should consider its various business activities and how they may negatively impact different stakeholders. The process should pay attention to individuals or groups who may be particularly vulnerable or marginalized.

2. Review How the Company May Be Involved with an Impact

Under the UN Guiding Principles, a company should consider three different modes of involvement — cause, contribution, and linkage — when assessing whether it is or may be involved with negative impacts on the HRWS.

Key Term: Linkage

3. Consider Impacts Arising through Business Relationships

A company should consider impacts arising through business relationships during the impact assessment process. Where it is necessary to focus on certain types of business relationships because of limited resources, a company should be guided by the severity of negative impacts involved, rather than focusing only on those relationships that are most important to the company.

4. Engage with Stakeholders in Assessing Impacts

To understand its impacts, a company should engage with affected stakeholders or their legitimate representatives as part of the assessment process. Where direct engagement is not feasible, companies should engage with credible proxies.

B. Prioritize Impacts for Attention Where Necessary

1. Evaluate the Severity of Impacts on Affected Stakeholders

A company should assess the severity of an impact on the HRWS by considering its scale, scope, and the extent to which the harm involved can be remedied.

Key Term: What are customary water rights?

2. Evaluate the Likelihood that Impacts will Occur

In addition to understanding severity of an impact on the HRWS, a company should under- stand the likelihood of it occurring or recurring.

3. Prioritize Impacts for Attention

Where it is not possible to address all HRWS impacts at once, a company should prioritize impacts for attention based on their severity and likelihood, with severity being the dominant factor.

C. Build a Systematic Approach to Assessment

1. Review and Build on Existing Systems

A company should review whether its existing assessment processes provide it with the information it needs about impacts on the HRWS and address any gaps that may exist.

2. Pay Particular Attention to Cumulative Impacts on the HRWS

Cumulative impacts arise from parallel contributions by one or more actors that lead to a negative impact on the HRWS. Such impacts may be particularly severe and challenging to address. A company should ensure that its impact assessment processes adequately capture such cumulative impacts, so that appropriate action can be taken to address them in collaboration with other relevant actors, including the state.

Relevant Key Terms

What are relevant business activities?
Relevant business activities include everything a business does in connection with the life cycle of its products or services, from the sourcing of components or commodities to its design, production, delivery and after-service. This includes hiring and/or contracting staff, contractors, suppliers, customers, governments, or others. Activities can include procurement, legal, compliance, sales, operations, human resources, R&D, among others.

What is linkage?
Linkage refers to the actions of a business partner or another entity in a company’s value chain that cause an impact that is directly linked to the company’s own operations, products, or services, which the company itself did not cause or contribute to.

In the context of corporate water stewardship, “direct linkage” may be similar to the concept of “indirect water use”; however, this Guidance uses the terminology of the UN Guiding Principles to ensure consistency with companies’ broader efforts to implement their responsibility to respect human rights.

What are customary water rights?
Customary water rights refer to rights over water use that are acquired or established by traditional patterns or norms within a particular sociocultural setting. Companies should consider these rights in a range of settings, but particularly where there are indigenous communities.

Continue on with the Guide

Published

January

2015

In partnership with

Table of Contents

  • About
  • Overview
  • Understanding Impacts
    • Understanding the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation
    • Impacts on People
    • UN Guiding Principles and Corporate Water Stewardship
  • Respect in Practice
    • Develop a Policy Commitment
    • Assess Impacts on the HRWS
    • Integrate and Take Action
    • Track and Communicate Performance
    • Remediation and Grievance Mechanisms
  • Supporting Human Rights
  • Resources
    • Diagnostic Questions
    • Glossary
    • Human Rights and Corporate Water Stewardship
    • Specific Sections of the Guidance
    • Standards and Instruments Related to the HRWS
  • Download Full Report (PDF)
Newsletter

CEO Water Mandate

UN Global Compact | Pacific Institute

ceowatermandate@unglobalcompact.org

About the Mandate

  • Mission & Governance
  • Endorsing Companies
  • Strategic Partners
  • Focus Areas & Working Groups
  • FAQs
  • News

Mandate Resources

  • Water Stewardship Academy
  • Water Stewardship Toolbox
  • Water Action Hub
  • Newsletter
Tweets by H2O_stewards

United Nations | Privacy Policy | Cookies Policy | Copyright

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT
  • Navigate
    • About
    • Understanding Impacts
    • Respect in Practice
    • Supporting Human Rights
    • Resources
  • Download Full Report (PDF)