Guiding principles

SHIRA is one of the primary mechanisms in the Social Way for ensuring that sites fulfil their responsibility to prevent or manage adverse impacts on external stakeholders linked to the site.

SHIRA is an integrated, comprehensive process for identifying, preventing and addressing potential negative impacts on external stakeholders, and risks to the business. SHIRA is guided by the mitigation hierarchy of avoiding, minimising, mitigating, remediating and offsetting/compensating, and by the hierarchy of controls of elimination, substitution, engineering, separation, administration, and PPE. SHIRA is underpinned by some key principles:

• Stakeholder-focused – the emphasis in SHIRA is on identifying and managing adverse potential social and human rights impacts on external stakeholders.
• Consultative – the process is critical to the outcome. Potentially affected stakeholders should have the opportunity to inform potential impact identification and mitigation. This happens through a site’s Stakeholder Engagement processes (3A) and Social Incident and Grievance Mechanisms (3B).
• Inclusive – inclusion and diversity are central to both the Social Way and Anglo American’s values. We recognise that certain stakeholders may experience impacts differently and more, or less, severely than others. Analyses should consider these factors when determining the consequence level of potential social and human rights impacts and risks.
• Transparent and informative – sites should be as transparent as possible in relation to information-sharing, stakeholder engagement and potential social and human rights impact analysis. Transparency may be constrained by legal requirements, commercial confidentiality, or by security considerations (for example, if engaging specific stakeholders puts staff or stakeholders at risk). In general, however, a participatory and inclusive approach should be underpinned by openness. Sites cannot understand the full range of potential and actual impacts without engaging a wide spectrum of stakeholders. Similarly, those stakeholders cannot form a reasoned opinion on potential and actual impacts without an understanding of the site’s activities and future plans.
• Cross-Functional – SHIRA is not the sole responsibility of the Social Performance team. Potential impacts on external stakeholders can arise from the actions, behaviour and policies of each department and those departments are typically best placed to take ownership of the relevant controls.
• Comprehensive and continuous – the objective is to identify all adverse potential and actual impacts on external stakeholders within a site’s Area of Influence, including those potential and actual impacts resulting from contractor activities. Impacts may emerge or evolve at any time, emphasising that SHIRA is an ongoing process.

A human rights approach

The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) shape Anglo American’s approach to human rights.

The UNGPs set out core expectations for companies, including the requirement to undertake regular human rights due diligence (HRDD), in which potential positive and negative human rights impacts on stakeholders should be identified and described. The UNGPs underline that addressing adverse impacts is a company’s responsibility, not a voluntary choice. The approach for identifying impacts can consist of a number of integrated processes including formal risk and impact assessment (social, security, environmental, political); incident and grievance management procedures; and internal and external assurance processes.

Box 3C.3 The UNGPs

The UN Guiding Principles were unanimously endorsed by the Human Rights Council in 2011. Since then they have been integrated into numerous key business and human rights frameworks and standards, including the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the IFC Performance Standards.

The UNGPs comprise three inter-related pillars:

1. The State duty to protect against human rights abuses by any parties, including businesses, through appropriate policies, legislation, regulation and adjudication;
2. The corporate responsibility to respect human rights, meaning that businesses are expected to avoid infringing on the human rights of others and to address adverse human rights impacts with which they are involved; and
3. Access to remedy, which requires both states and businesses to ensure greater access by victims of business-related human rights abuses to effective remedy, both judicial and non-judicial.

SHIRA incorporates the principles and objectives of a HRDD approach into its methodology without explicitly framing potential impacts in human rights terms. For example, an adverse impact on the health of community members as a result of excessive dust caused by site vehicles does not necessarily need to be described as an impact on the right to health. This impact on community health does, however, need to be identified and addressed.

Box 3C.4 Using human rights language in stakeholder engagement

Sites should consider whether, and to what extent, they wish to use the language of human rights in both internal analysis and external consultations. This may be context-specific. Human rights can offer a common point of reference that facilitates a shared understanding of site’s roles and responsibilities in relation to stakeholders. It can be a valuable tool in promoting greater accountability. In other contexts, the term ‘human rights’ may carry particular connotations, and the language of human rights might prove divisive or be misunderstood. At a minimum, sites should communicate with external stakeholders in terms of actual or potential impacts, how these are being addressed and the effectiveness of controls.

While SHIRA assesses potential social and human rights impacts on external stakeholders that may be impacted by site activities, it does not replace the full HRDD process as required by the UNGPs (see Box 3C.5).

Box 3C.5 Human rights due diligence and SHIRA

HRDD is an ongoing process for identifying, preventing, mitigating and accounting for how a company addresses actual and potential human rights impacts in their own operations, their supply chain and other business relationships. HRDD is not a discreet, stand-alone exercise but incorporates a number of aspects that are integrated into wider risk management processes across relevant functions. SHIRA, which focuses on assessing and managing potential social and human rights impacts on external stakeholders (local communities and contractor workers operating at site), is one aspect of the wider HRDD process required across the business. Other functions that will have a key role in assessing and addressing potential human rights impacts include human resources (for potential impacts on direct employees) and supply chain (for potential impacts caused by suppliers e.g. poor labour conditions in a factory that supplies equipment to site). Human rights-related risks and impacts related to joint venture partners and in the context of mergers and acquisitions are managed separately through Group or the BU.

In some cases, a more in-depth, standalone human rights impact assessment may be needed. This may include, for example, where exploration activities are planned in a new high risk environment; if there have been allegations of human rights abuse against the site or site’s business partners; if there has been an increase in allegations of human rights abuses in the local environment more broadly; and where there is a significant change in site activities such as transition between phases of the asset lifecycle. In such cases, the Social Performance team should work with other functions to agree responsibilities for managing the process and actions to address findings. Any findings relevant to impacts on external stakeholders should be incorporated into SHIRA/the baseline WRAC.

The UNGPs state that when a business is assessing its human rights impacts it should draw on internal and/or independent human rights expertise.

Where such human rights expertise does not exist in-house, sites should involve a credible external human rights expert in the SHIRA process. Involving an external human rights expert in the SHIRA process may not be needed every year but should be done at regular intervals. For sites that have potentially significant adverse social and human rights impacts, either due to the nature of activities being undertaken by site or due to high levels of vulnerability in the external context, it is recommended that an external expert is involved every year. Where there have been significant changes in the internal or external context it is also recommended that an external expert be involved.

Where human rights expertise does exist in-house, sites may still choose to commission an independent human rights expert to assess potential social and human rights impacts and risks in order to strengthen credibility of the assessment findings and build trust with potentially affected communities. The potential human rights impacts and risks identified in the independent assessment must be incorporated in SHIRA/the Baseline WRAC.

Lifecycle planning

SHIRA is a requirement at every stage of the asset lifecycle. Across the lifecycle, potential social and human rights risks and impacts are ever-changing, with some impacts specific to the point in the lifecycle.

Box 3C.6 Closure planning: social transition

Sites should be addressing potential impacts and risks related to social transition through operational management to avoid having any closure liabilities. Potential impacts and risks relating to social transition should be identified and assessed as part of the sites annual SHIRA process, as part of the ORM process. Increasing levels of detail around potential impacts and risks related to social transition will need to be considered as time remaining to scheduled closure reduces. Findings from SHIRA will be used to inform the Closure Risk Assessment (see MCT Tool 1) and to develop the social components of the preliminary, draft and final closure plan (see MCT Tool 2).

The actual execution of closure will be managed as a project and the risk management process will therefore follow the Anglo-American Investment Development Model requirements. A Closure Social Impact Assessment (distinct from SHIRA) must be undertaken when sites are five years from planned closure and the results of that assessment will inform the final closure plan.