Page 4 - 2019 Sustainability Report

4 2019 Sustainability Report
To Our Stakeholders
I believe that for Gran Tierra Energy to be successful, we must be operationally excellent, socially and environmentally responsible, and create value for all of our stakeholders while protecting human rights in the areas where
we operate. As one of the largest oil operators in Colombia, our job is to help develop the country’s natural resources.
Just as important as effectively executing
our core business is the manner in which we do it, and that is why sustainability is woven into our environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies and principles that guide how we operate.
This means we carry out our base business operations with skill and precision every day, complying with all local, regional and national laws and regulations. It also means that where possible, we go Beyond Compliance. This ethos led to our $13 million environmental investment and partnership with the NGO Conservation International to address one of Colombia’s biggest challenges: widespread deforestation threatening the country’s unique biodiversity.
To us, it’s not enough to simply mitigate any impacts on the environment that could arise from our operations; our vision is to create a model that not only prevents deforestation from happening but can even reverse the problem,
working together with the national government, local authorities and communities.
Our Beyond Compliance culture has led us to clear large areas of antipersonnel mines and orphan oil spills that resulted from decades of conflict in the southern Putumayo region where we are planning to conduct significant exploration activity. It is what inspired us
to partner with organizations like the Von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute to develop tools that help us design future development projects that respect, preserve and coexist with the Putumayo´s unique biodiversity. It is this commitment that drives us to utilize our excess natural gas to generate power and maintain reservoir pressure instead of flaring it, and to reduce our surface water usage and discharge.
We continue to make progress in deepening our company-wide culture of safety through a continuous drive to improve standards across all of the organization. As a result, in 2019 we achieved our best safety record in the history of the company, as measured by the Total Recordable Incident Frequency (TRIF) and Lost Time Injury Frequency (LTIF).
We also continue to engage in productive and ongoing discussions about how we