At Intersec 2024, Masdar's director for QHSE Dr Hadi Al Badi explained how the company was intertwining ESG principles with HSE to create a safer work environment
"We implement important, focused HSE governance across all our projects and assets to ensure the safety of our operation," said Dr Hadi.
Explaining that this structured approach is crucial for safeguarding their stakeholder and business partners, Dr Hadi added that it also ensures that health and safety considerations are integrated at every stage of a project and in operations.
"We have a dedicated ESG team that specifically values the three elements - environment, social and governance - throughout the projects and assets lifecycle. This team is also responsible for overseeing a range of ESG activity and initiatives including capacity building, stakeholder management, and resettlement. They ensure that these are critical factors to be addressed comprehensively during managing the execution of any project."
According to Dr Hadi, Masdar's projects go through several stages: screening, evaluating the ecosystem, getting the right contractors, construction, and operation. However, the most important aspect remains to responsibly decommission the projects.
"These stages will ensure that HSE and ESG aspects are carefully managed, adhering to the top global standards. For example, some of the ESG activities that we perform activities like initial environmental and social risk screening."
Other activities include project details studies, and ENS compliance management, said Dr Hadi, adding that Masdar also performs stakeholder management, biodiversity, action plans, livelihood restoration and climate change risk assessment.
"On the other hand, when it comes to HSE activities, we perform health and safety screening and evaluation during engineering, procurement and construction, implementing project specific HSE management system to ensure that the management system is tailored for the operation or the projects that we have constructed. We also manage HSE performance and learning from incidents by having an incident management programme in place and continue capacity building and outreach programmes throughout the project's lifecycle and the assets."
Renewable energy meets ESG principles
"Access to capital, business opportunity and cost saving is also related to HSE and to ESG. These elements are now intertwined with HSE and ESG. As the world shifts towards clean energy, the sector's growth makes access to capital increasingly important. This ensures that our clean energy business is not only future proofed but also sustainable, leading to cost effective clean energy technologies. Eefficiency in developing an implementation of the project's potential is another concern that a lot of companies need to maintain if you're positioning yourself at the right place.
"These factors are becoming more important to our stakeholders and partners and in the community we operate. There is a continuous evaluation on how organisations and companies are managing HSE and ESG.
"Innovation is another key aspect. Practices within the renewable energy sector drive progress and environmental sustainability, safety standards and corporate responsibility. Innovations does not only reduce environmental impact, but also enhances HSE practices, creating a resilient and socially responsible renewable energy sector."
