to cement factories, railroads, and trucking companies, to assess their ability to support the construction associated with our natural gas project by providing raw materials and logistics. The team also visited with many local and national government stakeholders in the mining, port, and transportation sectors to solicit their input and support. The result of the trip was a thorough assessment of goods, services, and infrastructure available locally, which we plan to use as much as possible as we develop the Tortue gas field. A more detailed description of this infrastructure assessment can be found on page 41. Our exploration activities are supported out of the Port of Nouakchott. In 2016, we relocated our operations to a new area of the port in order to allow for future expansion. The relocation was completed safely and without incident. Prior to the move, we held a Health and Safety workshop to reinforce our expectations of our employees and contractors, both multi-nationals and those based locally. As part of our seismic program, Kosmos has supplemented national requirements by developing its own guidelines for seismic surveys based on international best practices and specific recommendations from the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, an advisor to the United Kingdom on national and international conservation. This productive collaboration resulted in heightened measures to protect sea turtles and marine mammals offshore Mauritania. During our seismic operations, we work closely with the Institut Mauritanien de Recherches Océanographiques et de Pêches (IMROP) to ensure that we are also contributing to scientific knowledge about the Mauritanian offshore environment. We rely on local experts to help develop the best marine research possible. Kosmos works hard to apply the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in every country where we work. Our ongoing presence in Mauritania includes a small office staff and related office services. During operations, we also employ highly skilled labor and services for drilling and seismic surveys, as well as the management of the shore base at the Port of Nouakchott. In late 2015 we conducted a labor rights risk assessment of our operations in Mauritania using a third party expert. The purpose of the study was to deepen our understanding of potential labor risks in our workforce and our supply chain and to identify areas for further analysis and improvement. The assessment’s recommendations included: •  Conduct a more detailed assessment of working conditions at the port, with a particular emphasis on safety and work hours •  Conduct human resource management capacity reviews for our local office and all vendors •  Trace and map key vendor supply chains •  Deploy training and capacity building programs that promote diversity •  Internal harmonization and coordination of standard setting, performance monitoring and data analysis. 31 Kosmos’ operations in Mauritania are based out of the Port of Nouakchott. “The BGP Programme was founded in order to provide information about the vulnerability of the Mauritanian waters to human activities, reduce the environmental risk off offshore development, and strengthen the protection of marine biodiversity. While Mauritania’s coast is quite famous for wildlife, experts had very little information about marine biodiversity in deeper waters where oil and gas activities were beginning to take place. Thanks to the BGP research, we now know that the waters offshore Mauritania are globally significant for large numbers of seabirds and marine mammals. For example, up to one million seabirds can be encountered along Mauritania’s narrow shelf break, coming from the North and South hemispheres to forage in these waters outside their breeding season. We also discovered that these seabirds concentrate in well-defined and predictable areas around the shelf break together with marine mammals such as humpback, sperm and blue whales. Understanding and being able to predict such biodiversity hotspots will help the oil and gas and fishing industries mitigate potential impacts to biodiversity. Therefore, investing in biodiversity research in Mauritania’s deeper water is a way for Kosmos to not only reduce its own risks, but more importantly to contribute to sustainable development in the region.” DR. KHAIRDINE MOHAMED ABDALLAHI Coordinator of Resource Research and Environment Program, Institut Mauritanien de Recherches Océanographiques et des Pêches (IMROP)