Working with communities

Many of our operations are located close to communities. We work with communities to understand their priorities and concerns. This is essential to our being a responsible company.

We engage with communities to identify how we can avoid, minimise or mitigate any negative impacts. This engagement also determines how and where we can add sustainable benefits in the form of employment, contract opportunities and social investment programmes.

Our work with communities follows our health, safety, security, environment and social performance (HSSE & SP) Control Framework. Our social performance teams, working closely with our environmental teams, use the framework to guide their work. It governs how we plan projects and run operations. The framework recognises international standards as a benchmark – such as the environment and social performance standards set by the International Finance Corporation.

Each major project and asset at Shell has a social performance plan. This includes a summary of our impacts on communities and the environment – which are identified during the impact assessment process – and the actions we take to address them. (See Sustainability governance). We use indicators to monitor the progress of our work in communities. The indicators used are relevant to each local community and may include monitoring spending on local goods and services or measuring and categorising community feedback.