It is well known that business activities can have (potentially) negative impacts on human and environmental rights along global supply chains. The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) has an extensive collection of cases of business-related impacts on the rights of those affected, mostly reported by journalists or civil society actors in partner countries, to which companies (can) respond.
Together with the BHRRC and a data analyst, the Institute has systematised some 15,000 individual cases from the BHRRC database and developed a ‘Global Heat Map of Alleged Corporate Abuses’. The aim is to enable researchers and experts in the field of business and human rights to work systematically with the data, and thus to advance knowledge about alleged negative corporate impacts on affected people.
What does the Global Heat Map show?
The Global Heat Map visualises global trends in alleged human rights and environmental abuses recorded by the BHRRC from 2017 to 2022.
Users can filter by various categories, such as the type of alleged abuse, the economic sector, or the country where the alleged abuse occurred.
The Global Heat Map is particularly useful for looking at longer periods of time and comparing developments between different years. For example, the Global Heat Map shows that, with the exception of 2018, the number of alleged violations by companies has increased steadily since 2017, with a sharp increase between 2020 and 2021.
What does the Global Heat Map not show?
The Global Heat Map has technical limitations. An entry may appear multiple times due to the different dimensions of the alleged abuse: for example, an alleged abuse may relate to land rights and indigenous peoples' rights and involve several actors (company 1, company 2).
The Global Heat Map allows you to filter by country where an alleged abuse has occurred. In addition, there is a dedicated filter (EU27) that can be used to filter out alleged abuses by companies headquartered in the 27 EU Member States.
It also does not include absolute figures for alleged human rights and environmental abuses, as the BHRRC collects publicly reported information. Furthermore, an increase in the number of alleged abuses over time does not necessarily mean that more abuses have occurred. The number of alleged abuses may have increased for a number of other reasons, such as rights holders becoming more aware of the available avenues of redress and therefore reporting more abuses.
For this reason, the Global Heat Map is currently aimed at researchers and experts in the field of business and human rights who are familiar with the methodological difficulties.
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