Materiality

We periodically revisit our sustainable development report preparation processes and continue to refine our approach for assessing the topics that should be covered by our reports.

Materiality assessments are used to help us focus attention on those issues that are most important to our internal and external stakeholders. 

Our materiality assessment takes a two stage approach:

1. Identify issues: We need to identify and respond to those issues that are relevant to our internal and external stakeholders.

2. Prioritise issues: We systematically work through those issues identified and rank their importance. 

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. 
• Those issues with a medium or high importance to internal or external stakeholders are included on this website.
• 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.