At Lockheed Martin, we integrate sustainability throughout our business strategy. To understand the core issues that are most material to our business, it is vital to engage with a wide range of stakeholders to seek feedback and input and to analyze industry trends, which we do continuously, in addition to conducting a robust assessment every five years. Our core issues inform our Sustainability Management Plan (SMP), which provides a strong framework to clearly define our goals and drive our sustainability progress. We also focus on relevant other sustainability topics beyond the SMP that have an impact on people and our planet.

Lockheed Martin performs a formal core issues assessment every five years to ensure that we continue to prioritize issues that are relevant to our business and that matter most to our stakeholders. Feedback is key to this process and involves engaging with a diverse group of global internal and external stakeholders, including employees, suppliers, customers, investors, academia and non-governmental organizations through surveys, interviews and other outreach.

The input is compiled and used to narrow down a core group of sustainability issues most material to our stakeholders and business. According to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), material topics “represent the organization’s most significant impacts on the economy, environment, and people, including impacts on their human rights.”

These results are compared with business sector-specific results identified by an artificial intelligence tool that performs materiality analysis by assessing corporate sustainability reports, annual reports and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings; scanning mandatory regulations; and targeting media focus on a given issue to provide broader external sentiments on sustainability issues. We also compare our results with the list of financially material issues outlined by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) for the aerospace and defense sector. These data sets help cross-check, validate and prioritize the core issues that will guide Lockheed Martin’s SMP for the next five years.

Our Sustainability organization oversees the core issues assessment process. The Lockheed Martin Risk and Compliance Committee is the current vice president-level committee with specific responsibilities for oversight of elements of our sustainability initiatives. Our Chief Executive Officer provides final approval of the core issues, which are then presented to the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee of the Board. After the core issues are established, we work with internal stakeholders to create specific sustainability goals that we use to track our performance. These goals are approved by both our Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer.

The 13 core issues that constitute Lockheed Martin’s 2025 SMP are grouped into four priority categories.

To learn more about the management of each SMP goal, visit our 2025 SMP Management website. To see our annual progress toward these goals, visit our 2023 Sustainability Performance Report.

At Lockheed Martin, we have developed robust processes to monitor emerging issues and continue to evolve our sustainability efforts between our formal five-year core issues assessments. Our dedicated Sustainability organization includes experienced and expert staff who maintain currency with global program and reporting compliance requirements, emerging priorities and trends. In addition, we actively participate in sector-specific and broad industry organizations and forums, and we conduct formal and informal benchmarking of our programs, priorities and goals. As a company, we maintain active engagement with our investors, customers and a broad range of both internal and external stakeholders.