This is the second of a two-part set on leadership and mine water management. The first article explored the theme about what leadership means for successful mine water management.
In this article, I provide a few takeaways based on a quick skim of some mining company sustainability reports that have appeared year to date (as at April 21st, 2021).
I limited my reading to looking at the Top 10 gold mining companies in 2020 . Why gold? Why not? The gold mining industry is a curious thing, with a breadth of variables, and arguably owner to some of the most diverse historic performance with respect to water management amongst the commodities.
So here are some of my takeaways from my quick skim.
Number of top 10 gold companies that have published a 2020 sustainability report: 6
– hmmmmm, it is nearing the end of April after all – that’s a lot of water already under the bridge (sorry)….. – information is only of value when it is timely and finds the right people, not to mention meaningful 😊. My point is that data and relevant information should be freely available to stakeholders as required.
Number of Top 10 gold companies with a standalone water report: 1
– these are big companies with several operations, and several are members of the ICMM that requires its members to publicly disclose the company’s approach to water stewardship. A brief web page or some text buried in a report with a lot of other information does not count for a deep dive and do justice to such an important issue.
Drilling down on the content and lifting some of the positive themes:
- The reporting is definitely improving, or at least the quantity of it, as I’ve mentioned before
- Seemingly overall good performance and progress and the companies are certainly proud of that
- A real focus on basin level challenges and solutions, building partnerships with communities and protecting the environment
Of course, there is always a balance and I note:
- A lot of wrapped up numbers at the enterprise level, when the devil is in the detail at the site level
- A bunch of numbers does not necessarily tell the story, so tell the story
- Good alignment with the ICMM reporting guidelines, but too prescriptive – for example – one company reporting on water quality notes “96% of the water we withdrew was from high quality sources” – that doesn’t sound so good, maybe some context would help? Is that a lot volume-wise, can we improve?
- A range of metrics but a focus on withdrawals and discharges that may mean little without context, also careful with units, making values very small may be a ploy but may backfire if trying to build trust?
I could go on but may wait for a rainy day. I will try to get to the real data in another article, I’m sure that would generate some discussion!
2 thoughts on “Mine water leadership – Part 2: are you talking the walk?”