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Model structure.

The Social Subcategories were chosen based on recommendations in The UNEP SETAC SLCA Guidelines, which were informed by the International Policy Frameworks (International Conventions, Covenants and Declarations), and by an advisory board.

For all of these social issues, opportunity exists to make progress or advancement, in particular to establish initiatives or to create a market to improve negative social conditions.

The development of the SHDB uses a data driven approach. In total, over 800 publicly available data sources have been reviewed and over 300 incorporated to the database. First, a review of available data sources is conducted. Global indicator and qualitative data is extracted from various international organizations with strong statistical departments such as the World Health Organization, the International Labor Organization, the World Bank, and many others. Second, a decision is made on whether it is appropriate to research sector-level data for the theme in question. Third, the data to use are chosen based on a set of criteria, which include:

1) Comprehensiveness (# of countries and sectors for which data is available);
2) Legitimacy of the data source;
3) Reliability of method(s) used to collect data by the source;
4) Quantitative and qualitative indicators;
5) Relevance to the theme investigated;
6) Time relevance (data is current).

The way the risk levels are determined for all social indicators vary in structure, making each one unique. Distinctions include the use of quantitative and/or qualitative data, the number of sources used, and whether multiple indicators are used to create an overall or combined risk level for the theme.

After data collection, the characterization methods are developed to present the level of risk. Most Social Theme Tables characterization models have been developed from even distributions of the data, where quartiles or obvious transitions were defined as low, medium, high, and very high risk.

There can be many Issues within a single Social Theme, and multiple Themes make up each Category. To better understand the vast amount of social impact information for the Country- specific Sectors (CSS) in a supply chain, a Social Hotspot Index (SHI) that considers many of the Social Issues in the SHDB, is calculated using a weighted sum methodology. In-depth description of the SHI is available in the SHDB Supporting document.

Global Trade and worker hours’ model.

The Social Hotspots Database is a modular system, which includes three main components:

1. A Global Input Output Model for supply chain mapping (Licenses only)
2. A Worker Hours Model for calculating a social footprint or handprint and identifying hotspots (Licenses only)
3. Data on social risks and opportunities (Licenses and Risk Mapping tool)

Technically, the SHDB is an extended input/output Life Cycle Inventory database providing a solution to enable (1) the modeling of product systems and (2) the initial assessment of potential social impacts.

The SHDB system’s 1 current Global IO model is based on the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) Version 9, a global economic equilibrium model. The total database contains data for 57 different sectors, in each of 140 different regions; most of these regions correspond to individual countries while others are regions containing multiple countries. The SHDB system can be used with other supply chain models including Eora, WIOD and process based models such as Ecoinvent.

The labor intensity data were developed by converting GTAP data on wage payments into estimates of worker hours, skilled and unskilled, for each sector in each GTAP country/region. This was made possible by compiling and using wage rate data, for skilled and unskilled labor, by sector and region. These labor hour intensity factors are used together with the social risk level characterizations, in order to express social risks and opportunities in terms of work hours, by sector and country, at a given level of risk relative to each of 30 social impact subcategories and 132 different indicators.

1 Monique Bennema, Gregory Norris, Catherine Benoit Norris, 2022. The Social Hotspots Database V5. NewEarthB.