Higg’s New Social Benchmarking Solution Facilitates ESG Knowledge For Consumer Goods

Higg’s New Social Benchmarking Solution Facilitates ESG Knowledge For Consumer Goods

While environmental performance and climate change are high on sustainability agendas, firms are still in the early days of understanding how to magnify and measure their social impact. Higg, a sustainability insights platform provider has released new social and labour benchmarks for consumer goods manufacturing. With the launch of labour and social standards, Higg enhances its offering by providing industry access to the SLCP’s Converged Assessment Framework (CAF), facilitating high quality data on firms’ social and labour performance in value chains.

Compared to other industries, retailers and consumer goods manufacturers prioritize supply chain sustainability metrics more than other industry segments (see Verdantix Global Corporate ESG Survey 2021: Supply Chain Sustainability Spotlight). However, while the industry has extensively committed to net-zero and energy transition, sustainability agendas still have work to do when it comes to social impact. Retailers and consumers are asking for more visibility into value chains, which is in turn pressuring the consumer goods industry overall to address their impact on local communities. To this end, Higg's newly developed social and labour benchmarks compare sustainability performance within the industry and across regions. By doing so, firms can identify specific ESG and sustainability areas for improvement.

Social sustainability issues such as forced labour, freedom of association and unsafe working conditions are hot-button topics that expose firms to high legal, operational, and reputational risk. Besides the ethical obligation to address them, these issues require compliance with regulations such as the UK Modern Slavery Act and the German Supply Chain Act (GSCA). In the ESG space, sustainability programs must level social impact with environmental metrics. Firms need to ensure that the global focus on climate change and environmental impact does not overstep their commitment to social issues covered by the UN SDGs. In this context, sustainability software solutions offer a great value to ensure a comprehensive approach to ESG matters. To this end, Higg’s multistakeholder solution is great news for consumer goods manufacturers that seek improvement in their social and environmental performance in value chains.