At Ørsted, we see human rights as fundamental principles to protect people’s dignity and ensure freedom and respect. We also believe they’re foundational for enabling a rapid and just green energy transition.
Why are human rights important in the green energy transition?
Developing our projects and supply chains in new markets poses important human rights considerations that we need to fully understand and address as we continue to grow.
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We’re committed to respecting human rights in everything we do – across our entire value chain.
Through our ‘Global human rights policy’, we’re committed to leading a build-out that works for people. In practice, this means that we want to proactively address any potential risks of negative impacts on human rights – and we want to be transparent about our efforts and challenges along the way.
What are we doing?
We’re working to ensure that human rights are respected across our entire value chain. This includes further developing and strengthening our human rights due diligence approach for our employees, local communities, and people in supply chains.
Once fully developed, the approach will be integrated across core business processes. This means we’ll have processes in place to identify and assess human rights issues across our full value chain, take appropriate actions, follow up, monitor, and report on activities internally and externally.
Developing meaningful stakeholder engagement processes and providing an effective grievance mechanism will also be key to ensuring a fully robust due diligence process.
Latest news
In 2022, Ørsted strengthened our organisational capacity to address human rights and conducted a comprehensive assessment of human rights impacts throughout our company.
The assessment had two main objectives:
- Identifying the most significant human rights risks in our value chain. You can find more information about the results below.
- Evaluating how well our key business processes align with human rights due diligence. The results indicated that we have a robust system in place to manage human rights impacts in our supply chain and operations, but we need to improve our management of human rights impacts on communities near our assets.
Our salient human rights areas
We’ve identified six key areas where human rights are most at risk throughout our value chain. Learn about our efforts to prevent, reduce and remedy any negative effects on human rights, whether on land or at sea.
What’s next?
In 2023, we’ll continue to develop and strengthen our human rights management system based on the findings of the impact assessment. This includes:
- Establishing a global standard for gathering feedback from communities.
- Creating a global standard and organisational structure for conducting human rights impact assessments for all new assets.
- Enhancing our approach to human rights due diligence for suppliers by focusing on high-risk categories and promoting stronger collaboration among internal teams to ensure better on-site presence, and more.
As part of our commitment to human rights, we also aim to communicate more about our efforts, progress, and lessons learned. Later in 2023, we'll publish more detailed information about our human rights due diligence.
Frameworks and partnerships
International frameworks
- UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
- OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises
- IFC Performance Standards
- ILO Core Conventions
Governance
Accountability lies with our Sustainability Committee with broad representation from the business, including People & Development, Procurement, QHSE, Global Stakeholder Relations, and Global Sustainability. Policies
This programme contributes towards the following Sustainable Development Goals:
