The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
Supply chains for minerals, agriculture, textiles and electronics can involve forced and child labour, conflict financing, deforestation and pollution. Due diligence standards and laws increasingly require firms to identify and address these risks, and producers to show what they are doing. This page sets out how adverse impacts arise in supply chains, how due diligence and traceability work, and what evidence serves the firms, regulators and producers involved.
Responsible sourcing · Assembly cluster · Bill of materials BOM-110
| Rare earth magnet | 88 | 6498 | None qualified | High |
| Gallium | 82 | 5080 | Recycling pilot | High |
| Copper wire | 25 | 1224 | Two qualified | Low |
| Lithium cells | 69 | 2429 | One qualified | Medium |
Fig.Supplier tier map. Design wireframe with placeholder names and illustrative values, not a record or a live system.
Responsible sourcing is the practice of buying materials and goods in ways that avoid contributing to human rights abuses, conflict and environmental harm. It rests on due diligence under OECD and UN guidance, on traceability through complex supply chains, and increasingly on laws that make these duties binding.
For responsible sourcing, in GCRI's spatial-intelligence reading, the map opens on night lights, population density, true-colour imagery and land cover with true colour from NASA GIBS, framed on the Strait of Malacca; every other NASA layer, live feed and forecast waits in the layer list.
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NASA GIBS / EOSDIS · ASTER GDEM (METI, NASA) · Blue Marble (NASA) · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · Natural Earth
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For responsible sourcing, in GCRI's spatial-intelligence reading, the map opens on night lights, population density, true-colour imagery and land cover with true colour from NASA GIBS, framed on the Strait of Malacca; every other NASA layer, live feed and forecast waits in the layer list.Satellite and model products as NASA publishes them, each with its own date; indicators, not assessments of any place; claim ceiling INTEGRATED.
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Environmental, labour and traceability limits. The dossier below sets out how the risk develops, what is measured, where the data come from, how it is modelled and who decides.
Labour abuses, conflict financing and environmental harm are more likely where governance is weak, informal production is common and supply chains are opaque.
International standards ask firms to identify, prevent, mitigate and account for adverse impacts, prioritising the most severe. Audits alone do not meet that standard.
Materials are mixed, processed and traded through many hands. Chain-of-custody systems and documentation can be falsified or broken.
Laws on forced labour imports, conflict minerals, deforestation and corporate due diligence make standards binding in some markets, changing what suppliers must show.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Conflict minerals | Minerals whose trade may finance armed conflict, commonly tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold. |
| Chain of custody | The documented sequence of ownership and handling of a material through a supply chain. |
| Adverse impact | Harm to people or the environment that a firm causes, contributes to or is linked with. |
Each indicator carries its unit, its cadence, the kind of source behind it and the evidence label a value would carry. No values are shown: a programme supplies them under its own authority.
| Indicator | Unit | Cadence | Source type | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firms reporting supply chain due diligence | percent of in-scope firms | annual | Corporate disclosures | DECLARED |
| Smelters and refiners assessed against a responsible sourcing standard | count | per update | Industry assessment programme lists | REPORTED |
| Goods with documented forced or child labour risk | count of goods and countries | per edition | Government lists | OFFICIAL |
| Deforestation linked to commodity production | hectares | annual | Satellite forest loss with commodity attribution | ESTIMATED |
| Grievances received and resolved | count | annual | Company grievance mechanisms | DECLARED |
| Countries implementing the EITI Standard | count | annual | EITI records | OFFICIAL |
The topic as a computational graph: named sources feed the methods, an evidence review gates the outputs, and the decisions stay with the authorities that hold them.
Fig. 02Nodes carry their type, two metric rows and a state; connectors show what feeds what; dashed frames name the owners; the timeline is the cadence. Design of the pipeline, not a record of a run.
Named public datasets and institutional records, each with its licence class. Sources by agreement are used only under their terms and never republished.
| Source | What it gives | Licence class |
|---|---|---|
| OECD Due Diligence Guidance and alignment assessments | Standards and assessments of industry programmes | Public, OECD terms |
| US Department of Labor List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor | Goods and countries with documented risk | Public domain, US government |
| Responsible Minerals Initiative smelter and refiner lists | Facilities assessed under the responsible minerals assurance process | Public lists, RMI terms |
| Global Forest Watch and Hansen Global Forest Change | Tree cover loss and commodity-driven deforestation | Open, CC BY 4.0 |
| Business and Human Rights Resource Centre | Allegations, company responses and legal cases | Public, terms to check |
| EITI data portal | Extractive sector disclosures | Open, EITI terms |
Trade and Strategic Resources prepares evidence. The decisions below are taken by the authorities named, under their own rules, and never by the platform.
| Who decides | The question | Evidence this page serves |
|---|---|---|
| Firms and procurement leads | Where to focus due diligence and how to respond to risks found | Risk maps; disclosure reviews |
| Regulators and customs authorities | How to enforce due diligence and import rules | Lists of goods at risk; traceability evidence |
| Producer governments and associations | How to demonstrate and improve practices | EITI and assessment evidence |
Materials are often mixed, refined and transformed as they move through supply chains. Once ore from many mines is smelted together, or cotton from many farms is spun, the physical link to the source is lost. Traceability then depends on documentation, which can be incomplete or falsified.
Impacts concentrate at the start of the chain: water use and pollution at mines, deforestation for agricultural commodities, and labour conditions in artisanal mining and farming. Those who make purchasing decisions are often far removed from these conditions.
Interventions can have unintended effects. Blanket withdrawal from a region can harm the livelihoods it intended to protect, and shift production to less visible channels.
Documentation and segregation models that track materials. They depend on the integrity of every link.
Chemical and isotopic analysis to infer origin, using materials science and chemistry. Methods are maturing and not available for all materials.
Satellite monitoring of land use and mining activity using geospatial information systems. It shows change but not conditions on the ground.
Estimating environmental impacts across a product's life. Results are sensitive to boundaries and data.
No method makes a supply chain fully transparent. Analyses state what was traced, how, and what remained uncertain.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.