IOGP’s vision is a global oil and gas industry with no fatalities, permanent impairments, or process safety events that could lead to these consequences.

Ensuring the health and safety of our workers, contractors, and surrounding communities is an obligation and a core value of the oil and gas industry. As the sector evolves to meet global climate and energy challenges, safety commitment must remain uncompromised.

IOGP, pioneering excellence in health and safety, works in a non-competitive environment with Members to continuously develop and adopt Health and Safety Recommended Practices to support a proactive, risk-based, and learning-focused approach that strengthens operational resilience, prevents harm, and fosters a culture of accountability and care.

Since it’s foundation in 1974, IOGP has initiated and fostered the development of a common safety language across the industry. This initiative has had a profoundly positive impact on the overall safety performance within our sector. For example, contractors supporting various operators across different regions can refer to the same safety principles and adhere to the same rules.

This consistency significantly reduces the risk of duplications, confusion, and the application of differing standards. A prime illustration of the benefits of harmonizing safety practices across our industry is the implementation of the Life-Saving Rules. These rules exemplify how standardization can lead to improved safety outcomes, providing a clear and unified set of guidelines that everyone can follow. IOGP started collecting and publishing Member safety data in 1985 and since that time the Fatal Accident Rate has reduced by more than 90%.

Using the insights gained from data alongside the understanding of human performance principles are essential to recognizing how work is done. These principles acknowledge that people are fallible and that errors can happen. Rather than assigning blame, a human performance approach provides direction and initiatives designed to enhance systemic learning, risk management, and continuous improvement. Unlocking human performance within an organisation requires a holistic approach, the IOGP Health Committee is dedicated to advancing health standards and enhancing health performance across the oil and gas industry.  Recent publications from the Health Committee include mental health and wellbeing, health foundations, occupational health and fatigue management.

Human performance principles also recognise the importance of ensuring that when people make mistakes, processes and equipment are structured to prevent those errors from leading to serious consequences. Together with IOGP’s Health and Safety Recommended Practices, this approach promotes safer, more consistent operations and drives sustainable improvement across the industry.

Engagement and collaboration with other global trade associations, regulators and the industry at large on IOGP Health and Safety Recommended Practices, such as Life Saving Rules and Process Safety Fundamentals are a cornerstone to promote harmonisation and alignment for safer, more resilient operations and driving sustainable improvements across the industry.

IOGP’s guiding principles related to Health and Safety are:

Visible and accountable leadership

Leaders must visibly and consistently demonstrate their genuine commitment to health and safety. They create conditions where people feel empowered to speak up, intervene, and learn—without fear of blame. Leadership sets the tone for a psychologically safe culture, where trust and openness underpin performance.

Learning-focused and just culture

Fostering a learning-focused culture promotes open reporting and fair accountability. Human performance principles to be embedded in incident investigations, audits, design and day-to-day operations, enabling organizations to learn from both successes and failures.

Frontline engagement and empowerment

Workers must have the knowledge, tools, and psychological safety to make informed decisions and stop work when conditions are unsafe. Engagement should go beyond compliance, building shared ownership of health and safety outcomes at all levels of the organization, including contractors, who employ 80% of the workforce and often lead some of the most high-risk work in upstream oil and gas.

Harmonisation and alignment

Industry-wide adoption of shared Safety Recommended Practices; for example, the IOGP Life-Saving Rules, Process Safety Fundamentals and Start Work Checks, ensures clarity, consistency, and mutual understanding across global operations.

Risk management and operational excellence

Operations shall be guided by systematic processes for the proactive identification of hazards, assessment of risks, and implementation of effective controls and risk mitigations, which must be practical, effective, and regularly reviewed to ensure their continued relevance and adequacy in managing evolving risks. Innovation in safety, in this context, is a key enabler to minimize exposure risks by introducing advanced technologies and smart processes and achieve safety and operational excellence. Digitalisation, including the use of AI (i.e., predictive analytics for health monitoring or AI-driven safety inspections, etc.), in health and safety are key enablers to achieve enhanced safety performance.

Transparent reporting and shared learning

Ensure that all incidents, near-misses and weak signals such as unsafe acts/conditions and safety observations are reported, documented, and thoroughly investigated to determine root causes Open and transparent reporting of data helps the sharing of lessons learned and insights both internally and across the industry and  understanding performance trends to identify where additional guidance is needed.  For example, the Life Saving Rules and Process Safety Fundamentals were developed based on a deep analysis of safety data and the Start Work Checks are an example of the standardisation of a proactive assurance process.

These principles reflect IOGP’s enduring commitment to protect people and their wellbeing and fitness for duty, enhancing process safety and operational integrity, and embedding human-centred design across all aspects of work.

Together, these initiatives support industry recommended practices and empower Members to enhance Health and Safety culture and performance across their operations, adapting to local contexts while maintaining globally consistent expectations.