Value
First, you must consider how positive or negative the company's impact is on the planet and society based on what is described in the impact analysis.
The range goes from strongly negative to strongly positive.
When assessing the value of the impact described, think about the absolute impact of the company.
For example:
Is the impact on workers under forced labour conditions negative or very negative?
Does society positively or very positively benefit from the creation of new jobs or the production of less air pollutant cars?
🚨 A few things to note:
Assessing the value (whether it is positive or negative) of the impact is subjective (i.e., there is no right or wrong answer; the value is based on your judgment).
The value is rated based on a topic, in other words, the impact described, rather than the company's particular initiative.
For example, the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of an oil and gas company and the GHG emissions of a pharmaceutical company should have the same value, such as 'very negative', as both are creating the same impact. It is the severity that will be company-specific and measure the dimension of the impact.
The value does not consider how “small” or “big” the impact is for a company. The severity should take care of the fact that for one company the impact described might be negligible while the same topic for a different company might be significant.
Remember, when you are assessing an impact, you should only take into account the topic addressed in the specific summary, independently from the other impacts of the company treated in different analyses.
For example, when assessing the impact of a pharmaceutical company on human health, you should not rate taking into consideration the waste the company contributes to with its medicine; this will be addressed in a different contextualised summary.