Occupational safety and environmental risk management in the UAE oil and gas sector: Overview of AHP analysis
Fatima Alsalamia, Mohammad Miftaur Rahman Khan Khadema
Abstract. UAE’s oil and gas sector is broadly contributing to its GDP as it is one of the significant components of income from natural resources. Different processes including drilling, refining, and pipeline installations carried out in the oil and gas industry impose several occupation safety and environmental safety risks to the respective personnels. Inadequate safety practices can lead to significant consequences such as injuries and even fatalities. All of which results in workforce shortages and increasing compensation costs due to accidents and environmental incidents causing operational downtime, cleanup costs, and reduce investor confidence. This study investigates occupation, safety and risk management of environment of the oil and gas sector in UAE. The risk associated with the field work mainly related to the drill operations and pipeline installations are investigated. To find key challenges and provide actionable directives, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used. Three main criterions were examined preparation before the operation, work progress during the operation, and end of operations. All the alternatives were evaluated through the pairwise comparison matrix and weight calculations provided overview and ranking of criterions and sub-criterion to sub-criterion. Alternatives are ranked under each criterion and results indicated that for the preparation before operations top significant sub-criterion was operational documentations; for work progress (during the operation), top significant sub-criterion was personal injuries; and for end of operation, site cleanup was top ranked. The findings of this research implicate the researchers to benchmark case of UAE’s oil and gas industry and take necessary measures to improve the risk management in the field work.
Keywords
Oil and Gas Industry, Occupational Safety, Risk Management, Analytical Hierarchy Process, United Arab Emirates
Published online 6/20/2026, 8 pages
Copyright © 2026 by the author(s)
Published under license by Materials Research Forum LLC., Millersville PA, USA
Citation: Fatima Alsalamia, Mohammad Miftaur Rahman Khan Khadema, Occupational safety and environmental risk management in the UAE oil and gas sector: Overview of AHP analysis, Materials Research Proceedings, Vol. 67, pp 999-1006, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21741/9781644904176-136
The article was published as article 136 of the book Climate Action and Sustainability
Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
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