Vestas has committed to recognize our responsibility to respect human rights as set out in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. To fulfill this commitment, businesses are expected to conduct a corporate Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA).
In 2018, Vestas undertook its first corporate-wide HRIA. The HRIA conducted by sustainable business experts BSR mapped relevant human rights risks looking at how Vestas might impact rightsholders across our activities and value chain namely, Procurement and Manufacturing, Sales and Construction, and Service. The assessment consisted of desktop research, an analysis of internal management processes, and interviews with internal stakeholders, senior management, and subject matter experts.
The corporate HRIA identified a number of salient human rights across our operations and value chain. Each risk mapped was prioritized according to two sets of criteria: salience of risk (scale, scope, remediability, likelihood) and relevance for business action (attribution, leverage, risk history, current management). To the right is an example of the results and how we work with it. This will change as time goes on. Credit: Vestas corporate-wide HRIA by BSR, 2018.

In addition to identifying salient human rights risk, the assessment resulted in over 50 recommendations to be implemented across the value chain over the coming years. Priority was given to the recommendations related to our governance and management of human rights. This led to an updated Human Rights Policy in 2019 which integrated principles related to relevant community human rights impacts and CSR. In 2020, Vestas continued this work and updated our social due diligence process to its third iteration. Going forward, our aim is to improve how we disclose our human rights performance and develop human rights training material.
Vestas recognizes that working with human rights is an ongoing journey and that we still have work ahead of us, primarily strengthening our human rights management across the value chain.