Continuing our sustainability journey

AWE recognises that our operations have long-time horizons and managing them sustainably is vitally important. For a number of years sustainability has been part of our overall business strategy, focusing primarily on the health and safety of our employees. In recent years we have extended our view of sustainability more broadly - including aspects such as the environment, our reputation, corporate governance and the teaming of our people. We have also sought to formalise the concept of sustainability further into our business.

In our inaugural Sustainability Report 2008, we laid out our sustainability reporting commitments for future years, and began to implement processes for measuring and reporting our sustainability performance with a strong focus on developing a system to measure and monitor our greenhouse gas emissions. This is AWE's second sustainability report which confirms our commitment to alignment of our sustainability objectives with our core business objectives as well as highlighting our sustainability performance during 2009.

Sustainability performance highlights 2009

Our sustainability performance in 2009 was pleasing. We made significant progress in developing our reporting frameworks, collecting data and reporting of our performance in the aspects that we believe to be the most important to our business: climate change and safety. We saw sustainability integrated more strongly into our business - now representing one-third of our overall business vision and key performance indicators against which our employees' performance is measured.

In 2009, we have seen a strong focus in Australia on the complex issues surrounding climate change and greenhouse gas emissions reductions. In response to this, AWE responded for the first time to the Carbon Disclosure Project, which was a valuable process in understanding our exposure to climate change and communicating this information to our investors. In responding to the CDP, AWE is also committed to minimising our impact on the environment. We hope to achieve this through initiatives such as our agreement with Air Liquide, which will reduce our carbon dioxide venting emissions from our BassGas joint venture by 25% from 2010.

Looking forward

Over the next year, we wish to continue formalising and embedding sustainability into the core of the business. In the years ahead, our focus will again be on safety and the environment and we will also be seeking to understand how AWE is perceived by stakeholders, and how we can maintain and improve our reputation for integrity, transparency and sensitivity in all areas of our operations. We understand that our social license to operate is contingent on government and community confidence that our operations are properly conducted and provide benefit to the community. We aim to engage with our internal (employees) and external (communities and investors) stakeholders, using two-way consultation we will create open discussions to understand and address material stakeholder issues and commit to improving on and reporting on these issues in subsequent sustainability reports.