Biodiversity
"Biodiversity" is a complex term, which means different things to different people. To us, biodiversity refers to the variety of life on earth - the different animals, plants and micro-organisms, their genes and the ecosystems of which they are a part.
Impacts on biodiversity make mining and processing projects potentially sensitive for regulators, local communities, investors, non government organisations (NGOs) and employees. Our long term business success depends on our ability to understand and manage these issues.
As part of our biodiversity strategy, our goal is to have a "net positive impact" (NPI) on biodiversity. This means minimising the impacts of our business and contributing to biodiversity conservation to ensure a region ultimately benefits from our presence.
- Approach
- Engagement
- Results
The biodiversity issues for each of our projects or operations can vary greatly, as do the opportunities for minimising negative impacts and creating positive outcomes.
Our biodiversity strategy and NPI goal provide us with both a performance target (achieving regional conservation gains) and the tools to help balance the potentially conflicting actions of resource extraction and biodiversity conservation. This enables us to demonstrate to government and others that we have a process for allowing the pursuit of economic development through resource extraction while conserving and even promoting conservation value in regions in which we are allowed to operate.
To achieve NPI, we first seek to understand the biodiversity features of the regions where we operate, as well as the "values" placed upon those features by our stakeholders. We then prioritise our actions, focusing on the biodiversity features that have the highest conservation significance (both global and local) to address key business risks such as land use conflict, access to resources and meeting our closure obligations.
Our biodiversity assessment tools and methodologies represent significant intellectual property and are increasingly being recognised by external stakeholders as leading practice, not only within the private sector but the conservation community as well. They include:
- A Group wide biodiversity values assessment protocol
This assesses the biodiversity values of our land holdings and surrounding areas to help prioritise action. - A biodiversity action planning tool
This helps operations understand and plan for the biodiversity features of the areas in which they operate and the values placed on those features. - An NPI accounting and offset design methodology
Following a number of internal pilots and external consultation, we have developed an offset design methodology to help businesses plan and implement offset programmes.
Since launching our biodiversity strategy in 2004, we have undergone a continuous learning process - both in defining and understanding the principles and concepts of responsible conservation management, and in developing, testing and refining the tools and processes that we need to do so. As a result, our strategy was revised and re-released in 2008.
