Korea safety agency, ESG society sign agreement to develop workplace-safety ESG metrics

The labor ministry said Thursday that the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency and the Korean ESG Society signed an agreement to develop workplace safety and health metrics for ESG management, in a push to standardize how companies are judged on industrial safety.

KOSHA Chairman Kim Hyun-joong and ESG Society President Ko Moon-hyun attended the meeting at the agency's Seoul regional headquarters.

The agreement is meant to standardize the value of industrial safety and health within the social component of ESG and raise ESG management standards across the public and private sectors, as the importance of ESG management grows worldwide. The society has more than 2,000 members and describes itself as the world's largest academic body specializing in ESG.

Under the agreement, KOSHA will supply data from its accident prevention programs, while the society will develop evaluation indexes and guidelines for safety-specific ESG assessment. The collaboration covers four areas: developing industrial safety and health-specific ESG indexes and guidelines; sharing information and infrastructure to help companies improve their safety and health standards; producing and distributing content to spread accident prevention and ESG management; and supporting cooperation to narrow gaps in safety and health standards.

The two organizations also plan to jointly hold academic conferences and safety culture campaigns, and to provide consulting to small and midsize companies that lack the internal capacity to build safety and health management systems.

"Safety-centered ESG management is now an unavoidable demand of the times," Kim said. "By combining KOSHA's specialized data with the society's multidisciplinary research capacity, we will lay a solid foundation for raising safety and health standards across our society."

"As a global ESG academic society, I am pleased to systematize the value of industrial safety and health academically together with KOSHA," Ko said. "I hope this agreement becomes a model of cooperation that is felt on the ground and raises Korea's ESG management culture another step."