Climate change
Rio Tinto accepts the need for climate change action and recognises the issue as being one of our greatest challenges and opportunities.
We believe that emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) resulting from human activities are contributing to climate change and that avoiding human caused changes to the climate is an important international goal.
Our businesses have a positive future in a world that is working to a global carbon constraints. We recognise that addressing the challenge of climate change will impose costs for GHG abatement and necessitate a change in the way the world uses energy. We support efficient, effective and equitable measures to tackle climate change, which promise a comprehensive, long term response to a globally complex problem. We accept the need for a price on carbon. See our position on climate change.
- Approach
- Product lifecycle
- Engagement
- Results
Our climate change programme includes initiatives in three key areas:
- Reducing emissions from our operations.
- Understanding and developing low emission product pathways by working with others on supply chain emissions and on breakthrough technologies.
- Engaging with governments and stakeholders to advocate sound and efficient domestic and international policies.
We operate in an energy intensive sector and we seek to improve greenhouse gas emissions intensity over the full lifecycle of our products. As a capital intensive business, changing our emissions profile is a long term challenge for us. We have targets to improve the energy and GHG intensities of all our operations. New technologies offer step change opportunities to improve our performance when developing large projects.
Climate change will affect our operations, particularly through the availability of water and extreme weather events. We recognise the need to understand and adapt to the physical impacts of climate change.
