Biodiversity and Mine Rehabilitation

We operate in a manner that aims to minimize our environmental impacts and promote sustainable land use.

Biodiversity
We endorse biodiversity conservation, and we consider the mitigation hierarchy of avoidance, minimization, restoration and offsets during the lifecycle stages of our operations.

In 2019, we adopted a new corporate standard for biodiversity management that formalizes our long-standing commitment to biodiversity conservation. The standard requires each site to conduct an assessment and identification of material risks to biodiversity and to manage any identified risks through the implementation of a biodiversity action plan. For new sites and major expansions of existing sites, the standard sets an ambition of achieving no net loss of biodiversity.

We have developed and implemented biodiversity action plans at 10 locations. At each of these sites, the biodiversity action plan:

• Identifies the biodiversity within the area of direct management control or significant influence, including the presence of listed threatened species and communities, in context with surrounding land;
• Assesses potential impacts, both positive and negative;
• Develops a range of strategies aimed at minimizing or mitigating biodiversity impacts;
• Informs our employees and communities in which we operate about the importance of biodiversity protection, and encourages their participation in biodiversity initiatives; and
• Sets and reports performance against site-specific targets.

By the end of 2020, we anticipate that all our locations will have undertaken a biodiversity risk assessment, with action plans developed for sites where material biodiversity risks are identified.