Performance
Overview
Sustainable development materiality assessment
Rio Tinto's strategy of investing in large, long life mines and businesses means we operate on long time horizons with some projects lasting 40 years or more from mineral discovery to mine closure. These are often situated in remote locations and represent large sums of immovable capital.
The continued success of our business therefore requires a strong commitment to sustainable development, to maintain a reputation that ensures ongoing access to people, capital and mineral resources. This commitment has a sound business case that goes beyond safeguarding the health of the planet for future generations. We believe this yields a range of long term benefits such as:
- Better return for our shareholders.
- Improved management of risk.
- Reduction in our operating costs.
- More business opportunities.
- Attracting and retaining high calibre employees.
- Maintaining or improving the value and quality of our products with less impact on the environment.
- Better development and employment opportunities for and relations with local communities.
- Local and regional economic development that, over time, reduces operating costs.
Sustainable development has become an integral part of the way in which Rio Tinto conducts its business activities, with leadership coming from the board of directors, the chairman and the chief executive.
Our statement of business practice, The way we work, was revised and updated in 2008 to reinforce this commitment to integrate sustainable development thinking in the way we make decisions about finding, acquiring, developing, and operating assets around the world.
Production from our operations supplies society with materials, while creating wealth to support community infrastructure, health care, education programmes and dividends to shareholders. It also provides the means and opportunity to develop new approaches to solving the world's environmental and human development challenges, such as climate change and poverty.
The board Committee on social and environmental accountability ensures that we have the policies, standards, systems and people in place to meet our commitment to sustainable development outlined in The way we work.
Rio Tinto took an industry leadership role in the creation of the Global Mining Initiative (GMI) in 1998, an industry programme that, ahead of most sectors, identified how mining can make a positive contribution to sustainable development.
We remain an active member of the International Council on Mining and Metals, which resulted from the GMI and aims to provide leadership on scientific and policy matters, maintain dialogue with all stakeholders, and promote best practice performance standards employing sustainable development principles.
Reporting boundaries
Rio Tinto's sustainable development data are reported for calendar years and, unless otherwise stated, represent 100 per cent of the parameter at each managed operation, even though Rio Tinto may have only partial ownership. With the exception of the Engineered Products and Packaging units, which are in the process of being divested, former Alcan operations have adopted Rio Tinto definitions and are included in the 2008 Rio Tinto dataset.
Integrated Rio Tinto and Alcan 2007 databases have been developed for greenhouse gas emissions, energy use and safety, but not for other sustainable development measures, due to significant definition and measurement differences for historic datasets.
Former Alcan operations are not included in the reporting of performance against our 2003 to 2008 health, safety and environmental targets due to the time scale associated with these targets and differences in the definition and measurement of data.
Rio Tinto reports in line with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) G3 guidelines. Accordingly, we use a materiality assessment to help us focus this report on those issues that are most important to our internal and external stakeholders (see diagram).
Omission from the material issues covered in our report does not mean that the issue is not managed by the company. A full account of our 2008 economic, social, environment and governance programmes and performance, including information on our data definitions and sustainable development reporting criteria, are available in the sustainable development section of our website: www.riotinto.com/ourapproach.
We self declare that our web based GRI report is aligned with GRI Application Level A+.
Our business units also produce their own local sustainable development reports. These reports will be available online from May 2009.
External recognition
In 2008, Rio Tinto was listed on the FTSE4Good and Dow Jones Sustainability World and STOXX Indexes and the Climate Disclosure Leadership Index. We maintained platinum ratings on the Business in the Community Corporate Responsibility and Environment Indexes and achieved a gold rating on their Workplace Index.