Alcoa’s commitment to long-term, high-quality research in the rehabilitation of its jarrah forests in Western Australia is upheld as a global example of a company delivering on its rhetoric and finding the resources to properly fund research, both in-house and in partnership with universities. As I travel around the world, Alcoa’s forestry research program is clearly seen as world leading in post-mining forest restoration. What makes this particularly remarkable is that Alcoa has achieved this in a global biodiversity hotspot. In our recent work with Alcoa, where we have partnered on work related to soil nutrients and optimizing biodiversity outcomes, their collegiality has been clear to see, and they are still pushing forward the boundaries of forest restoration by optimizing an already globally leading rehabilitation program.”
Dr. Mark Tibbett
Professor of Soil Ecology
University of Reading
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.
Mine Rehabilitation
We strive to lessen the impact of our mining operations by minimizing the environmental footprint for each mine. This includes minimizing the land disturbed for mining and progressively rehabilitating disturbed areas that are no longer required for operations.
Our goal is to maintain a corporate-wide running five-year average ratio of 1:1 or better (meaning less than one) for active mining disturbance (excluding long-term infrastructure) to mine rehabilitation. This will manage net expansion in the area of land disturbed.
The ratio for the 2015 to 2019 period was 0.97:1, which indicates we had a larger area rehabilitated or handed over compared to new disturbance. We expect the ratio to decrease as more areas at our closed mines in Suriname are returned to the Suriname government after rehabilitation.