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The Social Hotspots Database project was created in 2007 by Catherine Benoît and Greg Norris. The idea began during their work on the Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment of Products, published by UNEP, when Benoît and Norris noticed opportunities for improvement in Life Cycle databases. Most LCA tools lack the ability to specify the geographical location of production activities—information that is essential for social impact assessments. The Social Hotspots Database can play a role similar to Life Cycle Assessment databases in assessing product hotspots, but with the added benefit of geographical precision and potential social impacts identification. The development of the database started in September 2009.

It is a project of New Earth, a registered 501c3 non-profit organization. New Earth is also developing Earthster, a system that enables any company to understand and share the sustainability profile of their products’ supply chains.

The Social Hotspots Database allows for visibility in the supply chain by:

• Providing modeling of product life cycles by country specific sector
• Providing estimates on where the people are in the product’s supply chain and what specific risks and opportunities might affect them
• Expressing quantitatively the share of a supply chain where specific hotspots are found

It shows which country specific sectors represent the greatest share of worker hours in a given supply chain, which ones are the most at risk of human rights and social issues, and which ones can represent business opportunities to implement positive changes in livelihood.