At SWN, we focus our corporate responsibility (CR) efforts and reporting on priorities that are important to our stakeholders.

To identify these important CR priorities, we interview and consider the views of internal and external stakeholders, with respect to both SWN-specific activities and energy development generally. Based on this assessment, which we update annually, we identify key topics that can be grouped into the following six categories:

  • economic performance
  • governance
  • health and safety
  • environment
  • communities
  • workforce

We use this methodology as a basis for selecting which Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) indicators to report, and we believe our process for determining report content meets the GRI principle requirements for defining report content, sustainability context, materiality, completeness and stakeholder inclusiveness.

Key Issues1

Increasing concern to stakeholders
Medium
High

Economic Performance

  • Climate-related financial risks and management

Governance

  • Reporting/transparency

Environment

  • Chemical use and management
  • Non-greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (e.g., NOx, SOx, VOCs, particulate matter, hazardous air pollutants)

Economic Performance

  • Company financial health
  • Shareholder return
  • Commodity price volatility

Governance

  • Setting appropriate metrics and incentives
  • Risk management

Health and Safety

  • Safe working conditions and training

Environment

  • Environmental management, policies, targets and metrics
  • Environmental monitoring
  • Regulation/compliance
  • Wellbore integrity
  • Water quality, sourcing and wastewater management
  • Spill prevention and management; asset integrity
  • GHG emissions, methane emissions
  • Impacts of transporting materials

Communities

  • Economic impact in local communities
  • Proactive community engagement
  • Impacts on community infrastructure and quality of life
  • Community health and safety

Workforce

  • Managing contractors
  • Talent attraction, retention, development and career transitions

Governance

  • Stakeholder engagement
  • Good governance, anti-bribery, anti-corruption, anti-discrimination

Health and Safety

  • Employee health and wellness

Environment

  • Waste
  • Site impacts/site development
  • Seismic activity
  • Threatened and endangered species
  • Naturally occurring radioactive materials

Communities

  • Working with indigenous/sensitive populations

Workforce

  • Supplier diversity

Economic Performance

  • Optimizing well productivity and environmental and social impacts
  • Diversification, differentiation, resilience
  • Articulating the role of natural gas in the global energy future across the value chain

Governance

  • CR strategy and governance
  • Regulatory engagement

Communities

  • Pipeline infrastructure, access to markets

Workforce

  • Local hiring
  • Employee and Board diversity
Medium
Increasing impact on company
High
  1. Within each quadrant, the categories are listed in the order they are discussed in the report, not in order of importance. Also, the matrix includes only those issues found to be of high or medium impact on SWN and/or concern to stakeholders, with the issues of highest importance in the upper-right quadrant.