CEO LET TER TO OUR STAKEHOLDERS
At ONEOK, our commitment to responsible operations, meaningful engagements with our stakeholders and a willingness to adapt have remained paramount throughout our long history. We were early adopters as the marketplace evolved to expand these principles into formal environmental, social and governance (ESG) expectations, and we continue to embrace our philosophy of continuous improvement by working to enhance our operations and disclosures in these areas. The safety, health and personal well-being of our employees, and the safety and support of the communities where we operate, remain key elements of our daily operations and business decisions. Never has this been more apparent than in 2020. We acted quickly to minimize COVID-19-related risks to employees, provided financial support to our communities and worked with customers to continue our critical midstream services. We demonstrated the resiliency of our extensive and integrated businesses, continuing to provide solid earnings in a difficult operating environment. While 2020 presented many challenges, we did not allow the COVID-19 pandemic to distract from our commitments to our employees, customers and communities. During 2020, ONEOK contributed more than $8 million to charitable causes across our communities and achieved another year of best on record environmental and vehicle safety performance. We increased ESG-related disclosures, introduced limited external assurance for several metrics and adopted the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) reporting standards. In recognition of many of these efforts, we were named the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) Industry Leader in the category of Oil and Gas Storage and Transportation in addition to our inclusion in both the DJSI World and North America Indices. Additionally, ONEOK continues to be included in more than 30 ESG-related stock market indices, underscoring the fact that our efforts in these important areas are being recognized by our investors. From a business development perspective, in 2020 we created a group to better understand, prepare and innovate as we move toward a lower-carbon economy. Together with our sustainability team, this group is actively researching opportunities that will complement our extensive midstream assets and expertise. Opportunities under evaluation include the further electrification of compression assets, potential carbon capture and storage projects, sourcing renewable energy for operations and other longer-term solutions such as hydrogen blending, transportation and storage.
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