Health and safety are part of the company culture
In ARCADIS' General Business Principles, we have committed to providing a healthy and safe work environment for all our employees. To that end, we have a firm-wide health and safety vision and policy in place, based on a proactive and preventative behavior-based approach. Working healthy and safely is an integral part of the overall company culture and should be reflected in the behavior of our employees. Our goal is to protect our staff from injury and illness. To realize this, health and safety has the same priority as our other core values and is an integral part of the solutions we provide to our clients.

Health and safety management system
According to our plan, we have implemented in 2007 a globally compatible, systematic approach for the management of health and safety risks throughout the entire company. This means that ARCADIS companies:
• Comply with applicable legal and other requirements.
• Assign responsibilities for health and safety to line management.
• Identify and meet client-specifi c health and safety expectations.
• Assure the necessary health and safety competence of all staff.
• Recognize positive health and safety behavior among employees, suppliers and clients.
• Set targets for continuous improvement and implement systems to achieve them.
• Actively promote subcontractors to be in alignment with our health and safety policy.
• Track and report health and safety performance.
• Include health and safety into projects to reduce impacts to our clients and stakeholders.

Strong health and safety performance
The implementation of the global health and safety management system contributes to protecting our most valuable resource, our employees, but also makes health and safety a differentiator with clients. Increasingly, clients are stating that solid health and safety programs with continuous improvement, management stewardship and employee engagement are conditions for working for them.

ARCADIS' health and safety metrics continued to improve. Since the second quarter of 2007, the reporting system for commonly tracked Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is on line. Taken globally, ARCADIS reduced its Total Recordable Case Frequency (TRCF) by 31%, while the Lost Time Frequency (LTIF), dropped by 51%. Additionally, by the end of 2007, all of the ARCADIS operating companies reported TRCF's below the publicly available U.S. benchmark for the Architecture and Engineering Industry.
2008 global health and safety objectives will focus on:
• Continuing to drive down our TRCF and LTIF.
• Increasing near-miss reporting to proactively implement preventive measures.
• Improving the stewardship of health and safety throughout the organization.