Safety and Environment

Shell has a comprehensive set of business principles and rigorous standards covering health, safety, security, the environment and social performance. Our approach to safety includes ensuring that our facilities are well designed and maintained, and that our operations are safe and reliable. In the event of an incident, we follow strict emergency response procedures.

To achieve continuous performance improvement we manage health, safety, security, environment and social performance in a systematic way. This responsible approach to producing energy can already be seen in our work in the Karoo.

We aim to help meet the energy needs of society in ways that are economically, environmentally and socially responsible. To manage the impact of our operations and projects on the environment and society we have a comprehensive set of business principles and rigorous standards covering health, safety, security, environment (HSSE) and social performance (SP).

Our business principles provide high-level guidance and the Commitment and Policy on HSSE & SP reflects our aims on how we operate and involve communities close to our operations.

Those aims include:

• Do no harm to people;
• Protect the Environment; and
• Comply with all HSSE regulations.

Advanced technologies, new ways of operating and multi-stakeholder partnerships are helping to manage our environmental impact as we contribute to meeting the world’s growing energy needs.

We are continuously working to enhance these efforts, drawing on the improvement in Shell’s safety performance through trainings and safer behaviours and enforcing rules. Our efforts to identify ways to reduce our footprint across our businesses, projects and value chain are ongoing and always evolving.

In the Karoo, we will work to achieve the highest standards of water, noise, roads, traffic and air quality management.

When we operate in areas of high biodiversity value we carefully develop specified action plans and collaborate with experts and communities to protect ecosystems.

We continue to work in partnerships with leading environmental organisations to support conservation and help raise standards of environmental management in the energy sector. We have formal agreements with environmental organisations such as Wetlands International, The Nature Conservancy and Earthwatch. We have worked on more than 30 projects with these partners in 2010.