Severity

“Likelihood asks whether harm may occur; severity asks what the harm would mean if it did. ”

Severity is the moral and operational centre of human-rights due diligence. It directs attention towards the impacts that would be most serious for people, even when those impacts are inconvenient to quantify, financially remote or less likely than everyday operational problems.

The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights assess severity through three characteristics: scale, scope and irremediability. Scale concerns the gravity of the impact on the right. Scope concerns the number of people affected or potentially affected. Irremediability concerns how difficult it would be to restore people to the position they held before the harm.

These characteristics are related but not interchangeable. The death of one worker may have limited scope but extreme scale and irremediability.

Wage underpayment across thousands of workers may have broad scope even where each individual loss appears smaller. Destruction of a sacred site may affect a defined community and be impossible to repair through financial compensation. The collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh in April 2013 killed more than 1,100 people and injured thousands.

It made visible the severity of unsafe working conditions that had been distributed through commercial relationships. The event was catastrophic, but the risk was not created on the day of collapse. Building defects, worker pressure, weak enforcement and purchasing structures had accumulated while responsibility was fragmented. Severity should not be reduced to a score without narrative.

A matrix that multiplies scale by scope and divides by remediability can hide the nature of the impact.

The UN Guiding Principles indicate that one severe characteristic may be sufficient. Irremediable harm should not be averaged down because fewer people are exposed. Likelihood remains relevant for potential impacts, but it is considered alongside severity rather than allowed to erase it. Where impacts could be severe, due diligence may require action even when probability is uncertain.

This is particularly important for forced labour, fatal safety hazards, violence against defenders, loss of land or irreversible ecosystem damage affecting rights. Affected people's perspective is essential. Management may classify delayed wages as moderate because the amount is small relative to payroll. For a household without savings, the delay can mean eviction, hunger or debt.

Severity concerns the consequence for the rights-holder, not the inconvenience to the organisation.

Remediability is often misunderstood as the availability of compensation. Money can repay withheld wages or medical costs, but it cannot always restore health, family life, cultural identity or lost years of education. Remedy may include restitution, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition, yet some harms remain only partially remediable.

Prevention should therefore receive greater weight where restoration would be impossible. Positive programmes do not offset severity. Scholarships, clinics or community investments cannot neutralise forced labour or serious safety failures elsewhere in the operation. Human rights are not a portfolio in which benefits are netted against harm.

The relevant question is whether each severe impact is prevented, mitigated and remedied. Severity also shapes sequencing.

Organisations may face many impacts and lack capacity to address all simultaneously. The UN Guiding Principles allow prioritisation based on severity, with likelihood relevant for potential impacts. This is a sequence for response, not permission to ignore less severe impacts indefinitely. Governance should preserve the distinction between severity to people and materiality to the company.

A severe impact may later create legal or reputational cost, but that business consequence is not what makes the impact severe. Escalation thresholds should therefore operate independently of financial value. Likelihood should not be allowed to dilute severity prematurely.

A catastrophic but less frequent impact can still warrant urgent prevention, while an impact already occurring is no longer a hypothetical probability.

Separating severity from likelihood helps organisations avoid scoring systems in which rare, irremediable harm disappears beneath a numerical average. Probability informs response, but it does not make the consequence less grave for those affected. The discipline is to describe the harm before scoring it. Who could be affected? Which rights are at stake?

How grave would the effect be, how many people could experience it and could their prior enjoyment of the right be restored? Numbers support judgement; they do not replace it.

Practical application

Create severity criteria grounded in scale, scope and irremediability, with examples suited to the sector and context. Require assessors to describe the impact and affected rights before assigning ratings. Include affected-stakeholder and expert evidence, especially where management lacks direct experience of the consequence. Set escalation rules for impacts that are severe on any one dimension.

Keep severity separate from financial exposure and avoid averaging methods that suppress catastrophic or irremediable harm. Link assessment to prevention, mitigation, remedy and senior governance.

Why it matters

Severity helps organisations direct limited attention towards the harms that matter most to affected people. Without it, frequent but manageable issues can crowd out less visible impacts involving death, coercion, displacement or irreversible loss.

Common misconception

Severity is often treated as another word for risk score. It is not a product of likelihood and consequence from the organisation's perspective. In human-rights due diligence, severity describes the gravity of the impact on people through scale, scope and irremediability.

Connections

Human Rights Due Diligence uses severity to prioritise response. Risk considers uncertainty and objectives more broadly. Salience identifies the human-rights issues at risk of the most severe impacts. Remedy addresses what should happen after harm, while Due Diligence seeks to prevent and mitigate it before it occurs.

A question worth asking

Which impact would be hardest to put right, even if it affects fewer people or appears less likely today?

Selected references

United Nations. 2011. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. 2012. The Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights: An Interpretive Guide. OECD. 2018. OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Business Conduct. International Labour Organization. 2015.

Guidelines for a Just Transition towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for All. Donaghey, J. and Reinecke, J. 2018. When Industrial Democracy Meets Corporate Social Responsibility. British Journal of Industrial Relations 56(1): 14-42.