Covid 19 Impacts on Organizational Environmental Management Systems Performance- Overview of Oil and Gas Sector

Authors

  • Said M. Al. Suqri, Ali M. Al. Harthi, Asif Mahbub Karim

Abstract

Oil and gas organizations always aiming to enhance their environmental performance and ensure operational excellence. The later could be achieved by focusing on the main levers for an effective environmental management systems implementation which are; interested parties, continual improvement, prevention of non-conformities, risk-based thinking, leadership and commitment and competency framework. The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the natural environment. Many industries got interrupted, businesses such as logistics, aviation and tourism sectors got affected due to flights cancellation, regional lock-downs restricting people and services mobilization. This resulted in huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants to be reduced around the globe. Many reports estimated that in 2020, around 4-7% of the CO2 emissions is forecasted to be reduced, 19% of which is sectored from the industrial sector. Most of oil and gas organizations took urgent measures not only to take care of the health of its people and assets, rather they also developed urgent mitigation measures to promote necessary transformations to safeguard the natural environment. Such global pandemic proved that organization shall look into sustainable way of doing business, with support of environment management system standard; government authorities could put strategic actions of the optimized and efficient use of the resource, raising the environmental management systems demands on available management tools to drive optimized operations, cost savings and environmental excellence. This paper aimed at providing an overview of the COVID-19 outbreak impacts, the response and mitigation measures conducted and the possible benefits on the oil and gas environmental management systems performance.

Published

2021-01-19

Issue

Section

Articles