Page 74 - Demo

74 About Strategy and Governance Our People Our Business Our Outcome AppendixMitigating Negative Community ImpactsAlong with improving health and well-being, we want to reduce any negative social and environmental impacts that we have on local communities. Environmental impacts can include pollution or emissions. As part of our due diligence, in 2022, we conducted an environmental risk and impact assessment (ERIA) in six markets and at 11 sites to investigate their impacts on their immediate surroundings. For more information on the environmental risk assessment, please see the Pollution Prevention chapter. Equally, we strive to manage social impacts on communities. One important area here is safe driving, since we and our contractors travel a lot in local traffic in the course of business, for instance when visiting customers or delivering orders. We continue our efforts to promote road safety by rolling out campaigns across markets such as Thailand and Malaysia. In 2023, we raised awareness of road safety issues in Malaysia with the Health, Safety, and Environment Day.Poor infrastructure makes road safety especially challenging in Thailand. With this in mind, DKSH has taken a variety of measures to improve driver safety in Thailand. We already map the number of accidents occurring in the Thai market and identify why incidents occurred in the first place. In 2023, we recorded 103 traffic accidents (up from 77 in 2022) involving DKSH employees (46) and contractors (57) in Thailand. We counted the number of traffic accidents occurring outside our premises (50) and on site (53). Our goal is to have a 100 % accident and incident reporting rate. We encourage all DKSH employees and contractors to report all incidents and accidents, regardless of their severity level, to make sure this goal is reached, for instance, at meetings with supervisors and monthly contractor meetings.We attribute the increase in the number of traffic accidents to our successful efforts to encourage subcontractors to report all accidents and incidents they encounter while working for DKSH. Increased reporting signifies that we are successfully building trust with our subcontractors and fostering a culture of reporting.Nevertheless, we strive to reduce the number of accidents. All reported cases are thoroughly investigated with relevant parties to identify root causes and necessary corrective and preventive actions. We have implemented suitable measures aligning with the hierarchy of control, starting from hazard elimination to the use of personal protective equipment (PPE). Additionally, we prioritize employee and contractor education and awareness through over 4,000 hours of defensive driving and road safety training. More than 1,000 employees driving company vehicles and 700 contractors participated in defensive driving training in 2023. The courses were also offered to contractors, as they are responsible for more than half of all accidents. In 2023, we reached our goal of offering training to all drivers both within the DKSH fleet and working for contractors. In the coming years, we will continue to provide training for new drivers and refresher training for existing drivers.%u2023 GRI 413-1, GRI 413-2