Rio Tinto's challenge in contributing to sustainable development is to build an understanding of the real implications, benefits and opportunities that mining exerts on local and regional economies, and to contribute to a refined and targeted policy design, as well as its implementation, monitoring and reporting.

Key objectives are:

• To build a specialist knowledge of the impacts of mining activities on local and regional economies under different economic conditions;
• To identify current best practice and significant experiences with regards to regional economic development under the influence of large companies, with a view of defining models for broader applicability within Rio Tinto;
• To increase the efficiency of the resources currently invested in community programmes and development, as well as to help maximise the impact of our contributions to economic development where we operate;
• To ensure that ongoing efforts toward economic development across the Group are advanced and responsive to our current understanding of the characteristics of mining economies;
• To envisage Rio Tinto operations as catalysers of economic growth, and to promote region-specific, bottom-up, plural-actor and long-term types of economic development where we operate;
• To use Rio Tinto's influence and capacity to attract resources from third parties with an interest in the economic development of our communities, and to facilitate the coordination of different players and programmes.