Due Diligence for Responsible Sand and Silicate Supply Chains

Annex A. Methodology

The final dataset comprised of more than 450 documents provided data for risks and impacts associated with sand and silicate supply chains. Academic literature,1 policy papers and reported prepared by industry and civil society published by 31 December 2023 were included and provided examples of risks and impacts for over 110 countries. Media articles were excluded from the dataset primarily due to their volume and often sensational nature. The information was organised into individual cases by region and country. Where a document treated multiple place-based case studies, that source was duplicated and coded with the relevant global region and country. This methodological approach resulted into 461 cases. Table A A.1 shows the breakdown of all cases by global region and Table A A.2 indicates the first ten countries associated with the greatest number of cases.

Table A A.1. Breakdown of cases by global region

Global regions	Cases per region
Arctic	3
Asia-Pacific & Oceania, including Japan, Australia, Pacific Islands	11
Central Asia	1
East Asia	44
Eastern Europe	13
Europe	6
Latin America and the Caribbean	24
Middle East and North Africa	21
North America	22
South Asia	55
Southeast Asia	76
Sub-Saharan Africa	158
Western Europe	32

Table A A.2. Top ten countries in the data set

Countries	Number of related texts
India	43
China	35
Indonesia	29
Nigeria	25
USA	20
Vietnam	18
Ghana	15
South Africa	14
Kenya	11
Cameroon	10

Note

← 1.  Research abstracts were included in the dataset primarily because access to the full texts was not available. Despite this limitation, the abstracts often contained pertinent mentions of governance, social, and environmental risks related to sand and silicate materials. Including these abstracts was deemed valuable as they signal potential issues in specific countries or regions, thereby providing an indication of relevant concerns that might otherwise be overlooked. This approach ensures that even preliminary or limited information is considered, helping to build a more comprehensive understanding of the global landscape of risks associated with these materials.