Environment

This section reports on the environmental impacts of our operations, including those from our products, our manufacturing processes and our facilities and properties. For a high-level view of impacts throughout our value chain, please see Our Value Chain and Its Impacts.

Assessing Materiality

The materiality analysis used to plan this report identified eight environment-related issues as among the most material. Five are the same as those for last year's report:

• Low-carbon strategy
• Vehicle greenhouse gas emissions
• Fuel economy
• Cleaner technologies
• Public policy: GHG/fuel economy regulation

Three new issues emerged as highly material in this year's materiality analysis:

• Low-carbon fuels, which replaced clean and alternative fuels as a key issue in the materiality analysis done for last year's report, reflecting an increasing focus on the life-cycle carbon footprint of fuels
• Vehicle electrification, which emerged as a new issue in this year's materiality analysis
• Emissions trading and the cost of carbon, also a new issue in this year's analysis, reflecting the establishment of carbon markets in some regions and their likely future establishment in others

The analysis also revealed a global theme of increasing expectations regarding, and regulation of, a range of environmental issues associated with our products and manufacturing facilities. These issues include energy and water use (due to rising costs and concerns about long-term availability); tailpipe emissions and end-of-life management (due to increasing regulation); and product materials use (due to opportunities to improve the environmental performance of vehicles and cut costs through "cradle-to-cradle" solutions).

Precautionary Principle

The precautionary principle is the idea that if the consequences of an action are unknown, but are judged to have some potential for major or irreversible negative consequences, then it is better to avoid that action. We do not formally apply the precautionary principle to decision making across all of our activities. However, it has influenced our thinking. For example, in addressing climate change as a business issue, we have employed this principle.