Access To And Management Of Resources

Our Challenges and Opportunities

Access to resources is fundamental to the sustainability of our business. Our challenge is to achieve access to the resources relevant to our scope of operations while addressing heightened political and societal expectations related to obtaining and maintaining our licence to operate.

By appropriately identifying and effectively managing issues about accessing and managing resources, our opportunities include:

  • Obtaining and maintaining our licence to operate
  • Improving access to new business opportunities
  • Keeping ahead of regulations and reducing business uncertainty
  • Enhancing and protecting our reputation
  • Differentiating ourselves from our competitors
  • Ensuring that our human resource talent pool is adequate to support the Company’s growth.

These opportunities are fundamental to our sustainability as a business and our ability to deliver long-term shareholder value.
Read more about our relevant Risk Factors in the BHP Billiton 2007 Annual Report.

Our Approach

Our approach to addressing the challenge of access to and the management of resources is based on:

  • Having systems and processes – Sustainable Development Policy and HSEC Management Standards – to manage risks and issues, including those relating to our relationships with our internal and external stakeholders, human rights and the environment, including biodiversity.
  • Requiring sites to assess their exposure to potential human rights issues and develop management plans to address key exposures through our human rights self-assessment process.
  • All operations developing and implementing a community relations plan to ensure important stakeholder issues are identified and managed.
  • Introducing an aggregate Group target of a 10 per cent improvement in the ratio of water recycled/reused to fresh water consumed by 30 June 2012.
  • Requiring environmental and social impact assessments for all development projects.
  • Sites having and maintaining land management plans to identify, protect and enhance agreed beneficial land uses, including the consideration of biodiversity values. Furthermore, sites that operate in sensitive areas continue to implement biodiversity management programs.
  • Utilising internal tollgating and assessment tools, including formal risk and impact assessments, to identify environmental and social risks and issues associated with accessing resources and to ensure they are appropriately managed.
  • Proactively engaging our stakeholders and working with them to identify and manage their issues and concerns.
  • Publicly committing to a number of policy positions in conjunction with our key stakeholders; for example, we will not:
    • Explore or mine in World Heritage properties, and we commit to take all possible steps to ensure that the effects of operations adjacent to these areas are not incompatible with the outstanding universal values of World Heritage properties.
    • Commit to a new mining project that disposes of waste rock or tailings into a river.
    • Pursue deep sea tailings placement (DSTP) as a potential tailings disposal option for any of our current prospects. 

      Also:
    • Our Black Economic Empowerment and Employment Equity policies underpin our commitment to accelerating development and fostering entrepreneurship of historically disadvantaged groups in South Africa.

Our Performance

Over the last five years, our improvements in environmental performance against targets support our ability to access and manage resources.

For example, we have achieved a 6 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas intensity, a 4 per cent reduction in water intensity, a 3 percent reduction in general waste intensity and a 50 per cent reduction in hazardous waste intensity. While production volumes for our major products have increased significantly over the past three years, the Company’s total energy consumption has decreased, and greenhouse gas emissions have remained relatively stable. All of our operating sites have environmental management systems certified to ISO 14001, except two sites which are expected to receive certification in August 2007. As a result of our mining activities, we currently manage 149,050 hectares of disturbed land, and in 2007 we rehabilitated 41,720 hectares, or 28 per cent of this land. We continue to support biodiversity research, with a US$3.5 million expenditure in research and development. We had no significant environmental incidents and received four environmental fines totalling US$37,387 in 2006/07.

Going forward, our current performance results have formed the basis for identifying areas that require enhanced focus or performance improvement, and these are reflected in our new environmental targets for greenhouse gases, energy, water and land management.

We are enhancing our commitment to recycling with a new target of a 10 per cent improvement in the ratio of water recycled or reused to fresh water consumed. We are taking a proactive approach to biodiversity protection by developing a biodiversity assessment tool that will assist sites to identify biodiversity impact risks. We are also seeking opportunities to address regional biodiversity impacts outside the footprint of our assets; and in this regard, we have mapped the location of our operations in relation to World Heritage (Natural) Sites and internationally recognised biodiversity hotspots.

We have reinforced our commitment to land management with the introduction of a new target to reduce the amount of land available for rehabilitation by 10 per cent. This target embraces our approach to life-of-asset planning, recognising that rehabilitation and sustainable closure land use are essential parts of our stewardship approach.

Our new Human Resources Strategy aims to connect our Charter values, culture and business objectives to the way we manage our people. We are working to identify, recruit, train, develop and retain a talented, diverse, mobile and motivated workforce. We are also recruiting from countries in which we expect our future development to occur, collaborating with educational institutions on training programs, and ensuring the industry is attractive to new generations. All operations have tailored learnership (or apprenticeship) programs that provide for technical and personal training for tradespeople and technical university students. Equally important is the ongoing development of our internal talent pipelines to ensure we have people who are ready to meet future challenges and opportunities.

To our knowledge, there were no transgressions of the principles of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To assist sites to appraise their potential risks to human rights issues, we have introduced a target for all sites to undertake a human rights self-assessment and implement a risk-based human rights management plan by 30 June 2008. Similarly, all sites are to have a formal community engagement plan in place by 30 June 2008.

Our Priorities

  • Access to land. Our ability to successfully rehabilitate land and return it to a beneficial use enhances our reputation as responsible land stewards and resource developers and reduces our closure liability. The Company-wide Closure Standard specifies that all sites must have rehabilitation plans, and we have introduced a new target to reduce the total area of land available for rehabilitation by 10 per cent by 30 June 2012
  • Access to water. We are committed to reducing our consumption of fresh water and have introduced a new target of a 10 per cent improvement in the ratio of water recycled or reused to fresh water consumed by 30 June 2012
  • Biodiversity. We survey flora and fauna as part of exploration and project development programs, identify biodiversity risks and implement biodiversity management and closure plans at sites operating in sensitive areas, and we share leading practices through our internal networks.
  • Access to skills. Our revised Human Resources Strategy and Standards outline our comprehensive approach to employee attraction and retention, including effective targeting of required skill sets, recruitment and development of graduates from around the world, developing key relationships with industry and educational and institutional bodies to develop a pool of candidates for the mining industry. To this end we are providing scholarships and direct university sponsorships for professional mining roles, increasing our support of and intake into apprenticeships programs with a view to increasing the pool of trade-qualified personnel. We are also actively engaged in internal talent development.
  • Human Rights. To assist sites to appraise their potential risks to human rights issues, we have introduced a target for all sites to undertake a human rights self-assessment and implement a risk-based human rights management plan by 30 June 2008.

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