Early in the life of a major project, our policies and procedures require an assessment of potential health, safety, environmental and social issues, supported by stakeholder engagement. In addition, all projects, new or acquired, with the potential to increase carbon dioxide equivalent emissions more than 50,000 metric tons are required to complete a climate change assessment. The output from these activities helps ConocoPhillips shape the risk-management and decision-making processes entailed in project planning and design.

In order to identify environmental and social issues, project teams use a sustainable development scorecard and assessments, described below. This process is required for all projects that require board review and is strongly encouraged for all other projects. These tools remain active throughout the development phase of the project. As the project evolves, managers update and record new risks on a risk register. They incorporate steps to mitigate these risks into the development management plans and keep company management informed of how risks are being addressed.

Sustainable Development Scorecard

The scorecard provides a consistent process to ensure proper evaluation and documentation of sustainability issues at key stages. It also provides teams with a simple but thorough method of assessing whether potential risks and uncertainties have been fully addressed and resolved. All project teams are encouraged to use the scorecard to measure alignment with our sustainable development position, and its use is mandatory for capital projects that require approval by our board of directors. Such projects are not funded unless this evaluation has been completed.

The scorecard is initiated in the early stage of the project, when a single location has been identified, as the team begins planning design details. The scorecard uses a qualitative risk-based scoring system to assess whether our nine sustainable development commitments have been properly addressed during planning. It enables decision-makers to assess a project’s readiness to proceed to the next stage from a sustainable development perspective. During project development, the completed scorecard provides a concise visual summary of a project’s continued alignment with our principles. It also encourages project teams to take a life-cycle perspective by considering at the start of a project those issues that will become relevant during the operational and eventual decommissioning phases.

The scorecard fosters discussion of sustainable development issues among project team members, and between the project team and decision makers. These issues are logged into our risk tracking system for management throughout the project development process. In addition to the issues raised in the scorecard discussions, this process also enables the project team to set objectives for sustainability issues in each phase of the project.

Health, Safety, Environmental and social Assessments

We conduct assessments to identify how our business practices might impact the communities and ecosystems in areas where project development is planned. By identifying specific issues and the requirements of the host country, we can assess potential impact and how those issues can be avoided or mitigated. In determining what issues to investigate during the assessment, we begin with the host country’s legal requirements, and supplement these as needed in order to address the issues covered by our own HSE standards and sustainable development positions.