Sustainability
Sustainability Lab
An inherent part of our sustainability management is the continuous exchange with our stakeholders. In order to involve our stakeholders more intensively and to deepen specific sustainability topics, we established the Sustainability Lab as new stakeholder engagement format in 2023.
The new stakeholder engagement format is part of our strategic stakeholder engagement to gain outside-in perspectives, challenges, and impulses from representatives from business, science, politics and civil society.
The Sustainability Lab is a further development of the Stakeholder Advisory Council (SAC), which met in Ludwigshafen for the tenth time in fall 2022. Since 2012, members of the SAC and the BASF Board of Executive Directors have met once a year to engage in dialog, critically assessing and further developing BASF’s sustainability management.
With the Sustainability Lab, BASF is now establishing a format to deepen individual topics and issues related to sustainability and to shed light on them from different perspectives. In addition, the circle of external and internal experts with whom we want to discuss and think through the ever more complex topics is also expanding.
At the first meeting in July 2023, the participants worked on what BASF and other stakeholders can do to contribute to a successful energy transition and discussed various perspectives of it – finance, strategy, technology, mindset, frameworks. Because energy transition is a global ambition, we challenged the results from the central event with stakeholders in our regions. The Sustainability Lab is more than a new stakeholder engagement format: preparation, implementation and follow-up trigger important discussions inside the company on our way to a more sustainable future. In future, the Sustainability Lab will meet every two years to discuss a specific topic.
Interview with our Stakeholder Engagement experts
The Sustainability Lab process
Pre-engagement
During the pre-engagement phase of the BASF Sustainability Lab, we interviewed our invited guests in order to collect first impulses and ideas to be able to build on these results and enter directly into the discussions at the corporate event.
Corporate event
The corporate event of our new stakeholder engagement format brings together forward thinkers, sustainability leaders and change enthusiast to listen to, discuss with and learn from them. The event is designed to dismantle a big and complex topic, delve deeply into different perspectives in the workshop-like Transition Labs and holistically put it back together. We seek to find answers to what we need to address and how to get there. The key outcomes from the Transition Labs are summarized and will be challenged and complemented by the regions with the goal of including a global perspective.
The corporate event 2023 took place in Ludwigshafen, Germany. It was dedicated to the topic “Going Green – Fast & Fair - What we need for the energy transition we all want.”
Regional follow-up
Sustainability is a global topic and BASF is a company that acts globally. Therefore, also the engagement with our stakeholders needs to be global and needs to include the voices from our regions.
The Transition Labs in the regions – in 2023 Africa, America and Asia – challenge the key results from the corporate event, provide further insights and add regional specifics to the recommendations what BASF and stakeholders should do in and for the specific region.
Global summary
A document summarizing the global and regional specific findings will be shared with the participants. It completes the Sustainability Lab cycle and will be used to deepen our internal and external engagement.
BASF's representatives in the Sustainability Lab