Project environmental and social assessment

Use six connected stages to move from scoping to a traceable due diligence record. Project questions reference IFC PS1–8, with particular attention to labour, community safety, land, livelihoods and engagement.

1. Project E&S scoping. Describe activities, location, workers, contractors, land and communities. Review relevant IFC Performance Standards and retain unknown answers.
2. Social-impact register. Record impact pathways and affected groups, severity, scale, scope and ability to remedy. Keep evidence confidence and organisational risks separate.
3. Stakeholder and engagement planner. Identify affectedness, vulnerability, concerns and participation barriers. Include groups with limited influence and assign engagement responsibilities.
4. Evidence and gap checklist. Distinguish public guidance, regional context and project evidence. Record provenance, geographic coverage, study periods, retrieval dates and review status.
5. Mitigation and monitoring plan. Assign owners, dates, indicators and review triggers. Link actions to impacts and record evidence before marking an action verified.
6. Responsible business conduct review. Record policy ownership, business relationships, decisions, communication and grievance arrangements. Review information gaps across the six OECD due diligence steps and responses to actual or potential harm.

Responsible business conduct review

The RBC review connects the registers to the OECD due diligence process and UN Guiding Principles. Record a policy owner, covered business relationships, an assessor decision, communication, grievance arrangements and a review date. Each impact distinguishes actual from potential harm and whether the business causes, contributes to or is directly linked to it, with supporting rationale.

Response prompts distinguish prevention and leverage from provision of or cooperation in remedy for actual harm caused or contributed to. Review information gaps across all six steps. Information recorded is not verified implementation or a finding of compliance. This workflow supports project environmental and social due diligence; it does not assess every issue in the OECD Guidelines.

Impact significance, evidence and category

Physical displacement and economic displacement are separate questions. Include informal land users and people who lose access to livelihoods even if they do not relocate. Prioritise human-rights impacts using severity and remediability. Evidence confidence does not reduce impact severity.

A named assessor records a provisional A, B or C category, with a date, rationale and unresolved gaps. S1 does not assign categories automatically. Undetermined remains available. Financial-intermediary portfolio categorisation is outside this release.

Public guidance explains a framework. Country and sourcing observations provide regional context. Project evidence establishes site-specific facts; record consultations, workforce and land arrangements, permits, baseline studies and specialist assessments with source dates and coverage.

Automatic support from imported data

Complete scoping to load S1’s existing country indicators and, when a sector and commodity are selected, sourcing observations. Original S1 rules generate source-linked investigation prompts, a standards summary, unresolved questions and study actions. Add useful references as unreviewed regional context and assign owners and dates to planned actions. Suggestions update locally as you edit; reload context when the country, sector or commodity changes.

Source coverage gaps remain unknown. Pipeline retrieval does not refresh an observation period. Withheld ILO and environmental observations are excluded. Automatic support does not change answers, impact significance or the assessor category.

Illustrative Ukraine use

Road repair beside a market may restrict informal traders’ access without moving their homes. This can trigger PS5 investigation into economic displacement and PS4 community access and safety. It calls for consultation and a livelihood baseline; it does not establish actual impacts or a category.

Privacy and framework status

Anonymous drafts stay in browser memory and are lost on reload or closing the tab. Internal workflow links retain the current assessment while you review country context, sourcing and screening. A country or sourcing selection is applied to project scoping only when you choose it. Project text is excluded from URLs and analytics. Public scoping processes the submitted description transiently; it does not save an assessment. Saved records and exports are privately owned.

S1 provides guidance, not IFC compliance certification or endorsement. ISO 31000 and ISO 26000 provide guidance; ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 management-system certification requires independent assessment. No restricted standards clauses are reproduced.

Published 2026-10-08. Framework ifc-2012-s1-2026-10-08-v1. Practitioner review: pending.