Environment

From project design to operational closure, we focus on reducing our physical footprint on the land, identifying, managing and addressing our potential impacts by applying the principles of the mitigation hierarchy (avoid, minimise, restore/mitigate and offset).

We seek to minimise and mitigate harm to the environment, through environmental stewardship and responsible resource management across our global operations.

We develop and implement robust management systems for key environmental aspects, such as land and biodiversity, air emissions, energy, water and waste.

Our approach

We are committed to managing our land in a productive and sustainable manner ensuring proactive stewardship of our landholdings, including those that have not undergone industrial activity. In the spirit of the precautionary principle, we strive to understand and address environmental challenges at our operations, and to encourage resource efficiency and continuous improvement in our environmental performance, including prevention of incidents.

Our environmental management approach is designed to align with international and industry-specific environmental standards and guidance, such as ICMM Performance Expectations and to support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

We conduct our work with respect for legally designated areas, such as International Union for Conservation of Nature category I-IV protected areas. We do not mine or explore in World Heritage Sites.

We review environmental risks and opportunities and integrate them into our planning, operating and business decisions. We commit to addressing potential impacts on biodiversity by applying the mitigation hierarchy with the ambition of achieving no net loss of biodiversity.

We respect the rights, interests, traditional knowledge, cultural heritage, and ecosystem services of our local communities and Indigenous Peoples and seek to consider these in our planning and operational practices.

Environment - land management

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Our environmental management strategy

We require our industrial assets to develop and implement robust management systems, including assessment of their environmental risks and opportunities and development of appropriate mitigation strategies, to reduce potential impacts and reduce their footprint throughout all phases of the assets’ lifecycle. All industrial assets are expected to comply with relevant internal and external requirements, including environmental standards and guidance, regulatory approvals and permit conditions.

Our industrial assets’ environmental management systems should include standard elements such as:

An environmental policy;
Planning, implementation and operation;
Measurement, recording and evaluation; and
Reviews, corrective actions and continuous improvement.

Environmental management plans at our assets

Environmental management plans take a risk-based approach to address relevant environmental aspects and considerations, and include:

Maintaining the integrity of our facilities to avoid environmental incidents;
Efficient resource use, including energy and emissions reduction;
Management of legal and other requirements, e.g., permit conditions, environmental obligations;
Protection of land, air, and water resources; and
Proactive planning for asset closure (including financial provisions), with progressive rehabilitation wherever possible, to retain value, reduce liabilities and contribute to sustainable post-closure land use.

In alignment with UNGC SDG 17, we often seek to partner with organisations, to make a lasting contribution to the communities and environment in the region and beyond. Read more

Environmental incidents

We are committed to reducing our environmental impacts through decreasing the number of environmental incidents. We have established a global target of no major or catastrophic environmental¹ incidents.

We assess and record high potential risk incidents (HPRIs) at our industrial assets, which include events that could have resulted in a catastrophic or major environmental incident. The relevant senior management teams’ share lessons learnt from HPRIs and the affected industrial assets are required to implement action plans to address the causes and prevent repeats.

1 For environment, major environmental incidents are defined as ‘Widespread, but reversible, environmental impact to ecosystems, habitat or species (two to ten years to remediate)’ while catastrophic environmental incidents are defined as ‘Widespread environmental impact to ecosystems, habitat or species (irreversible, or >ten years to remediate)’.