Environmental, Social and Governance overview
In maintaining sustainable value creation, Sasol continues with its focus on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) matters and constructive engagement with stakeholders on these key critical issues. Our success and the sustainability of our business depends on the support of our stakeholders.
ENVIRONMENT
We recognise that there are some areas of our business which invite a significant number of questions from our socially responsible investors. As Sasol has identified environmental sustainability as one of our top risk events, we prioritise our efforts in this regard. This includes responding to climate change and minimising the environmental impact of our operations:
Climate change
Sasol is developing and implementing an appropriate climate change mitigation response to enable the long term resilience of the company’s strategy and business operations.
- In terms of our climate change response, we take, a short-, medium- and long-term view of our risks and opportunities, with the use of scenario analysis across our diversified portfolio to inform decision-making.
- In addition, Sasol proactively adopted the TCFD guidelines this year to enhance transparency on our climate change disclosures.
Guided by the Board, this year Sasol engaged with shareholders regarding a proposed resolution requiring a separate climate change report to be published in 2019. It is recognised that Sasol’s climate change management can benefit from optimised assurance to stakeholders. We therefore supported the objective of the proposed resolution and confirmed our intent to update our existing climate change booklet into a more comprehensive report, by and large aligned with the outcomes of the proposed resolution. Sasol believes that oversight of this process through its internal structures, including Board Committees, sufficiently provides for independent review in this regard.
Air quality
Sasol remains on track to deliver on its integrated environmental roadmap commitments to bring it into compliance with most of the new plant standards by 2025, as elaborated in the Environmental Sustainability Material Matter.
- Sasol continues to fund capital projects for environmental compliance.
- We received additional postponements to enable the safe and successful execution of the associated projects within the committed timeframes.
- In terms of the challenging new plant standard for boiler SO2, we continue to engage stakeholders for a longer term solution.
- Sasol’s air emissions offsets aim to achieve increasing improvements in ambient air quality and quality of life outcomes in the targeted communities, through a collaborative and constructive approach with key stakeholders.
Environmental Monitoring and Reporting
- Sasol has in place a transparent approach to ensure environmental compliance.
- Sasol, as a producer of hazardous wastes, emissions and water pollutants measures against defined environmental goals and reports on them:
- Reduction of our energy and
GHG emissions footprint:
- Sasol emitted approximately 115 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (Mt CO2e) of our 302 Mt CO2e carbon budget allocation. Current projections indicate Sasol is on track with its budget having used 38% of the budget in 40% of the time.
- Energy Efficiency improvement: we have achieved a cumulative energy efficiency improvement of 22,4% since 2013. We are targeting a further improvement of 1% per annum between 2019 – 2020;
- Ongoing water stewardship:
Sasol reaffirmed its commitment
to the United National Global
Compact CEO Water Mandate to
assist us in:
- responding to water risks; and
- reporting comprehensively on our progress – see our annual Communication on Progress published with the Sustainability Report.
The global drive to recycle plastics
- As global awareness of the impact of plastics on the environment increases, focus on the use of single-use plastics in consumer packaging is growing. Some of our customers purchase our polymers to manufacture industrial and consumer plastic packaging.
- Given this growing trend, Sasol is undertaking work to develop a coordinated response.
GOVERNANCE
The Board of Directors steers and sets the direction of the Group and brings independent, informed and effective judgement and leadership to bear on material decisions reserved for the Board, while ensuring that strategy, risk, performance and sustainable development considerations are effectively integrated and appropriately balanced. Refer to our Governance Framework on page 74 for more detail.
SOCIAL
Sasol is committed to ensuring a safe, healthy, engaged and productive workforce, with the required skills, knowledge and experience to succeed. Our safety approach is built on a strong foundation of leadership and competency, and is strengthened by clear policies and procedures.
Sasol is focused on further strengthening its key SHE capabilities on its journey toward zero harm. Given our commitment and approach to safety, we are deeply saddened to report that we regrettably had four work related fatalities this year, emphasising the fact that we need to remain relentlessly focused on improving safety outcomes.
As a major employer, with 31 270 employees across 32 countries (23% are women), we remain focused on:
Growing critical skills to sustain a talent pipeline across the globe:
- We pledged to the Youth Employment Service (YES) launched by the South African President to provide employment opportunities for the youth in this country;
- Our talent forums are well embedded in the organisation; and
- The special focus on young professionals rotations, additional development opportunities for our young engineers and programmes where candidates are selected for their potential to develop into more senior leadership roles, are key; together with investment and training programmes in place for employees.
Developing leadership capability and capacity:
- We have critically reviewed our leadership approach; and
- We are engaging our leaders to define the leadership style and approach we believe will bring to life our aspirational culture and deliver on Sasol’s long-term strategic objectives.
Promoting organisational culture and diversity
- Integral to our aspirational culture is that we value and promote diversity and inclusion. In our South African workforce, we are proud to announce 69% are black employees and the diversity performance together with the workforce diversity profile is shared in detail in the data tables of our Sustainability Report:
- In South Africa, the appointment of persons with disabilities is included as a measure on our scorecard; and
- Our diversity 10-point plan continues to provide the qualitative measures to enable us in meeting our equity targets.
Using our integrated value chain, we commit to facilitating inclusive and local supply chains, enabling local economies and the development of critical skills
Our stakeholder objective is to position Sasol as a credible partner and build trust with all our stakeholders. Our engagement approach is supported by open and effective communication, clear and agreed-on feedback, mutually beneficial outcomes where possible, as well as inclusiveness and integrity. In practice this means we:
- Prioritise meeting the commitments we make to our stakeholders
- Participate in initiatives to inform and ensure a best-practice approach in the areas of sustainability and socio-economic impact
- Actively engage with our stakeholders to ensure achievement of best possible outcomes
- Strive towards a sustainable multi-stakeholder approach to solve difficult challenges
We employ this approach across all areas of stakeholder engagement including socio-economic development, responsible business, transparency, health, and partnership in infrastructure provision – which are all premised on our commitment to inclusive and sustainable business practices and receive more attention in the Sustainability Report.
Our continued partnership with and through Mozambicans to realise tangible benefits for the community is of critical importance.