Target 2030
Rate of high‑severity process safety incidents (High Severity Process Safety Incidents, hsPSI) worldwide
≤ 0.10
Sustainability
Process Safety
Process safety is a core element of safe, efficient, and responsible production. It plays a material role in preventing pollution-related impacts by reducing environmental risks and ensuring the long‑term safe and reliable operation of our facilities. Through advanced safety concepts, continuous improvements, and proactive risk management, we help protect people, communities, and the environment throughout the entire lifecycle of our assets.
The BASF process safety strategy is dedicated to preventing fires, explosions, and hazardous material releases by ensuring design, construction, asset, and operational integrity, all supported by leadership and people development.
The safety, health, and environmental protection (SHE) concept serves as the foundation for the safe operation of a process plant. The SHE concept describes the main hazards of a plant along with the key hazard control and mitigation strategies. This includes documenting the basic process data, evaluating the adequacy of the plant’s location with respect to sensitive recipients, identifying the main process and occupational safety hazards and environmental impact, and developing or updating the fire prevention and emergency response plan. The SHE concept serves as a plant-specific reference for conducting implementation checks (IC) and management of change (MOC); and supports effective communication of risks and training initiatives.
The IC is the portion of the PHA (Process Hazard Analysis) dedicated to identifying the hazards, causes, consequences, and raw risks associated with all potential process safety scenarios and determining the reliability of safety measures needed. Safety measures are assigned to eliminate, control, or prevent possible consequences of risk gaps utilizing inherently safer design (ISD) or primary (preventive) safety measures. Risk assessment employs a semi-quantitative approach to determine the quality of primary safety measures.
Management programs integrate process safety principles into daily operations, including evaluation and updating of process safety information, validation of operating procedures, regular safety reviews, management of change, comprehensive training, incident investigation and communication as well as asset integrity maintenance. Furthermore, our plants are subjects to responsible care audits and PS management reviews ensuring continuous improvement.
High‑Severity KPIs at BASF
In 2023, BASF introduced a company‑wide strategic focus on preventing high‑severity process safety incidents. The aim of this realignment is to systematically reduce risks by consistently avoiding events that could have significant impacts on people, the environment, and assets.
This shift enables more effective resource allocation and strengthens internal governance and control mechanisms within safety management. Event‑based learning is being systematically embedded to ensure that safety‑relevant insights are consistently incorporated into operational decision‑making. At the same time, hazard awareness is further reinforced across all organizational levels.
As part of this strategic development, ahigh‑severity KPI for process safety (hsPSI, high‑severity Process Safety Incident) were introduced. The KPI measures high‑severity process safety events using a rate‑based methodology (incidents per 200,000 working hours) and serves as a binding steering metric across the Group. The global target value is 0.10 by 2030.
