In our materiality analysis, community impacts and human rights were identified as issues of importance to Ford and our stakeholders.
We judged community-related issues to be of high concern to stakeholders – particularly, of course, to members of the communities most directly impacted by the Company – and of moderate potential impact on Ford. While our relationships with host communities are key to maintaining our license to operate, we are currently facing more acute issues that could have potentially greater impact on the Company in a three- to five-year timeframe.
We judged human rights to be of high concern to stakeholders, and also of high potential impact on the Company. Our understanding of human rights issues and our integration of them into our core business practices is still less mature than some other operational issues we have a longer history of managing. Over time, however, as human rights is further mainstreamed into our business, we expect that it may move from its current position on the materiality matrix to become more of a standard operating issue.
Based on this assessment, we have included substantive discussion of both community and human rights in this full, online version of our Sustainability Report. At the same time, we have included discussion of human rights in the printed version of the report, which is focused on those issues we considered to be the most material for our Company at this time.
