Using the Guidance
The Guidance is a reference tool aimed at helping companies to develop corporate-level reports for internal and external stakeholder audiences. It can be used to report performance of activities in single countries, large projects or single operations.
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Introducing the stepwise reporting process
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Choosing the content for your report
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How to reference IPIECA/API/OGP in your report
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The Guidance is voluntary. It does not set minimum requirements or predetermine stakeholder needs. Instead, it encourages companies to make informed choices on what is important for their own reporting by engaging with their stakeholders and understanding their needs. Reporters can include relevant data and information that benefit from the consistency of industry consensus on the issues, indicators and reporting elements detailed in the Guidance. With effort focused primarily on those issues of significance to the individual company and its stakeholders, reporting time and cost can be better managed.
The Guidance provides two types of assistance by helping companies decide:
- ‘how’ to report, by describing a process for reporting; and
- ‘what’ to report, by providing options for developing the content of the report.
Process
In the Guidance, companies are encouraged to employ a stepwise process for reporting by:
- setting the context for the report by outlining the company’s high-level vision and strategy, together with governance and management systems;
- determining the issues to include in the report, using the concept of materiality which identifies the complete set of issues of relevance to both the company and its stakeholders; and
- selecting indicator data to be collected within the company’s reporting boundary and incorporated into the narrative.
The objective of each step is to build a transparent and concise report as part of stakeholder engagement. The process helps the company to verify which issues and indicators are not material and thus avoid unnecessary and time-consuming reporting which can obscure the relevant issues.
Content
The Guidance provides direction on the content of a typical oil and gas industry report as well as a set of performance indicators appropriate to sustainability issues in the industry. Each indicator provides a choice of reporting elements depending on the depth or accuracy required (i.e. depending on the materiality of the issue for the company). The reporting elements include measures that are ‘common’, being the most established and consistent across the industry today. Section 3 provides guidance (including reporting boundaries and data normalization) on the application of the performance indicators provided in Sections 4, 5 and 6, covering (respectively) environmental, health and safety, and social and economic issues.
Referencing
Companies who use the process and/or the content sections are encouraged to reference the Guidance, acknowledging IPIECA, API and OGP, since doing so demonstrates a company’s efforts to report consistently by applying oil and gas industry good practice. Within their reports, companies may wish to include an index of the Guidance indicators used, which would signal that their reporting meets the intent of the indicator description and follows at least one reporting element.
Categories:
- Reporting
