Our aim is to create the world’s most valued gold and copper company. To do this we must own the best assets, have them managed and operated by the best people and, beyond all else, we must deliver value and benefits for all our stakeholders.
To deliver value, we need to be the partner of choice for the countries and communities in which we operate. That means we need to be safe, we need to listen and be transparent in discussions and decisions, we need to operate with ethics and integrity and we need to consider the potential future impacts of our actions on the needs and health of those around us and the environment, and we must do this with a long-term view. Or more simply put, we must be sustainable.
At Barrick, sustainability has four key pillars: Contributing to the social and economic development of our host countries and communities, Protecting the safety and health of our people, Respecting human rights, and Minimizing our impact on the natural environment.
These pillars are overlapping and interdependent, and so too is our approach to managing them. We follow a holistic and integrated approach, which is grounded in science and long-term planning, and seeks to ensure our work from board diversity to biodiversity, community relations to climate change, water management to waste management complement each other.
We measure and report our performance against these four pillars in our Sustainability Scorecard using detailed key performance indicators (KPIs) and these are linked to executive remuneration. The aim of this benchmarking is to apply the same level of diligence and rigor to our management of sustainability as we do to our understanding of our orebodies and of our accounts. It is an approach that helps us build resilience, drive internal efficiencies and deliver demonstrable and achievable outcomes on the ground that align with the objectives, goals and targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).