Human rights management and integration 

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 updates from 2022  


We strengthened our organisational capacity to work with human rights and launched a corporate-wide human rights impact assessment.  

The results of the assessment have been twofold:  

  1. Identification of our salient human rights risks across our full value chain. These include labour standards and occupational health and safety, securing access to remedy, rights of local communities (including indigenous peoples), modern slavery in supply chains, and risks to human rights defenders. 

  2. A qualitative assessment of the key business processes from a human rights due diligence perspective. We have strong systems in place to manage human rights impacts in the supply chain and in our own operations, but we need to expand the management of human rights impacts connected to communities around our assets. 

What’s next?  

In 2023, we’ll publish detailed results of the impact assessment. Based on this, we’ll develop an overall human rights action plan covering key business areas and processes that we need to develop and/or strengthen, a stronger process for our grievance mechanism, better coverage of human rights in all stakeholder engagement practices, and better communication on how impacted rightsholders can seek remedy. We’ll also publicly communicate on our progress and lessons learnt. 

Key information


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: 

Sustainability programme

Sourcing metals and minerals responsibly 

We’re working closely with our suppliers and industry partners to find responsible ways to source the metals and minerals we rely on to build our green energy solutions.