Materiality
Materiality assessments are used to help us focus our sustainable development reports on those issues that are most important to our internal and external stakeholders.
Our process was developed in line with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidance on materiality and completeness. It involves identification of issues affecting our business and its stakeholders over the next three years and their prioritisation considering internal and external perspectives.
This process dictates how the issues are covered in our reports.
- Those issues that are highly important to both internal and external stakeholders are included in Rio Tinto's Annual report (See diagram below).
- Those issues with a medium or high importance to internal or external stakeholders are included on this website.
In 2010 we expanded our assessment to include outcomes of direct interviews with key shareholders, investment houses, academics and NGOs along with the opinions of the 1,265 global leaders who were surveyed as part of our stakeholder engagement work and the 33,000 employees who completed our global employee engagement survey.
Whilst our materiality assessments have supported stable topic coverage in recent years, the 2010 assessment prompted additional coverage of our Business Resilience and Recovery Programme.
We do not publicly report against all topics, but omission from our report does not mean that an issue is not managed by the company.
Future materiality assessments will be used to evaluate if an issue that is currently omitted has become sufficiently important to report on it again. This approach will streamline our report, enhance its readability and improve transparency.
