Cultural heritage

Preserving cultural heritage is an important part of our efforts to manage our social impact. Cultural heritage refers to places of archaeological, historical, cultural, artistic and religious significance. It also includes the preservation of unique environmental features, cultural knowledge and traditional lifestyles.

Our approach starts with considering how to avoid or minimise our impact on cultural heritage. This can involve carrying out archaeological assessments to inform, among other things, project design and site selection. We then develop chance-find procedures to deal with previously unknown heritage resources that may be discovered during construction. We train staff and contractors to make them fully aware of these resources to give them the authority to halt work if necessary.

In Albania, for instance, where we began exploring for oil in 2019, our pre-drilling impact assessments identified unknown sites of cultural importance, some of which date back more than 2,000 years. We suspended our activities to allow local experts to excavate and find out more. This led to significant finds of importance for Albania’s past. Read more at www.shell.com/inside-energy/preserving-albanias-past-while-building-for-its-future.

Read more about our approach to cultural heritage at www.shell.com/sustainability/communities/working-with-communities.