Our approach to managing community grievances follows the precautionary principle of ensuring local approval for OMV Petrom operations by identifying and resolving the issues of concern to the local community early on. We strive to conduct our operations in a way that limits any disruption to our neighboring communities to a minimum; however, grievances may still arise.
As a responsible organization, we conduct our activities minimizing any possible negative impact on the community in which we operate. This helps us to maintain the social license to operate and be recognized as a trustful partner by all our stakeholders. In the dialogue with the communities, our effort is directed towards collecting their feedback about our operations and the resulting impact. Therefore, we implemented a grievances system – Community Grievance Mechanisms (CGM) – at the OMV Petrom S.A. level, coordinated from the corporate level, which allows us to receive, register, and solve grievances, as well as to monitor our action plans. The CGM offers a channel to resolve grievances in a non-judicial manner and, depending on the case, access to remedy for community members. We define a grievance as an expression of dissatisfaction stemming from a real or perceived impact of the Company’s business activities.
In 2020, we registered 737 grievances related to society, human rights and environmental issues (total grievances), out of which 575 were solved together with another 101 from the previous year). Most of them, 402 grievances, were related to environmental impacts – 316 were related to land contamination – and 335 grievances were related to social impacts generated by our operations.
To evaluate the community grievance mechanism’s effectiveness based on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights criteria, OMV Petrom developed an Audit Assessment conducted by an independent auditor at the end of 2018. The UN Effectiveness Criteria require the grievance mechanism to be legitimate, accessible, predictable, equitable, transparent, rights-compatible, a source of continuous learning, and based on engagement and dialogue.
Our 2025 sustainability target | ► Assess Community Grievance Mechanism of all sites against UN Effectiveness Criteria (i) by 2025. |
Status 2020 | ► Implementation of self-check / audit assessment within OMV Petrom in order to have a continuous improvement towards fully meeting the UNGP effectiveness criteria for community grievance mechanism. ► Implementation of a new Grievances database, tailored according to Audit Assessments and specific actual needs ► Implementation and dissemination of the new Grievances Management Standard, including workshop with Business representatives. |
Action plan to achieve the target | ► Continue to implement the action plan based on the self-check/audit assessment of at least two Assets per year to have a continuous improvement towards fully meeting the UNGP effectiveness criteria for community grievance mechanism. ► Assess the opportunity to extend the CGM and the Grievances database at the OMV Petrom Group level. |
(i) UN Effectiveness Criteria for Non-Judicial Grievance Mechanisms as set out in the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The UN Effectiveness Criteria require the grievance mechanism to be legitimate, accessible, predictable, equitable, transparent, rights-compatible, a source of continuous learning, and based on engagement and dialogue.
The alignment of CGM to UN Effectiveness Criteria is assessed through management processes review, consultations, and feedback from internal and external stakeholders. The assessment’s recommendations were followed by tailored action plans to improve grievance management at the site level, as well as at the Corporate, Upstream, and Downstream level. These action plans are implemented by local management and monitored by the Compliance function. Until now, three assets were assessed in Upstream and Downstream Divisions (Petrobrazi refinery). In 2020 we updated the regulations regarding CGM and trained the persons in charge of these activities at the sites level. We will continue to conduct assessments of CGM base on the UN Effectiveness Criteria and in accordance with the plan at further OMV Petrom sites.