Ensure Long-Term Viability
Accountability for Sustainability Issues
The company’s various businesses are each responsible for integrating sustainability issues into their day-to-day operations, project development and decision-making and are held accountable through an annual goal-setting process. Progress is reported to the appropriate committees of the board of directors. Members of ConocoPhillips’ senior management, each reporting directly to the CEO, have final responsibility for developing corporate strategy, reporting company performance and assisting the businesses with implementation of sustainability-related issues. Integration of Sustainability Commitments Into Business Processes ConocoPhillips’ project authorization guidelines and due diligence standards require that any new business venture identifies health, safety, environmental and social risks, in addition to technical, commercial and political constraints. A new venture must demonstrate that those risks and constraints can be addressed in order for the project to be approved. Early in a major project’s life, our procedure makes it mandatory to complete an assessment of potential environmental and social impacts, supported by stakeholder engagement. Major capital projects undergo a sustainable development evaluation to ensure that the social, economic and environmental issues are fully understood and have been addressed. In addition, projects with the potential to emit over 50,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide are subject to a greenhouse gas emissions cost-of-carbon evaluation. The output from these activities helps shape the input for the risk-management and decision-making process of project planning and consequent project design. Sustainable Development Scorecard The sustainable development scorecard prompts proper evaluation and documentation of sustainability issues at key stages of each project and 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, but it is mandatory for capital projects costing over $30 million. Such projects are not funded unless this evaluation has been completed. The scorecard uses a qualitative risk-based scoring system to assess whether our nine sustainable development commitments have been properly addressed during project planning. It gives decision-makers a sustainable development perspective on a project’s readiness to proceed to the next stage. 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, considering at the start of a project issues that will be relevant in operations and in eventual decommissioning.