Streamlining sustainability indicators

Challenge

Anglo American PLC, a British multinational mining company with headquarters in London, reached out to Corporate Citizenship (an SLR company) for help in establishing a lean set of indicators across their Safety, Health, and Environment (SHE) disciplines. They reached out because they wanted to meet the needs of a diverse set of internal and external stakeholders and inform the customisation of their new sustainable performance management platform to overcome sustainability challenges.

Sustainability for this business is particularly challenging given the industry thaqt they operate in. It presents a unique set of challenges and difficulties to overcome. The input from both internal and external stakeholders further presents another level of complex challenges, particularly in relation implementing any new processes or directives aimed at overcoming sustainability challenges.

Solution

Corporate Citizenship worked hard on this project to build a data map tool that identified a hierarchy of metrics and how they were used to satisfy internal requirements, strategic management requirements as well as external reporting requirements. The development of the data map tool was informed by a series of internal interviews with SHE experts to help inform decision making.

This solution was presented to the client who were satisfied not only with the direct outcome, but also with the longer term strategic goals that are able to be implemented into the business.

Impact

The results of this exercise identified several SHE discipline revisions for Anglo American, including surplus indicators for deletion, identification of missing indicators and suggested new indicators required to address internal or external reporting gaps. Anglo American now has a justified suite of SHE indicators with all cross-relationships and functions fully understood, and all internal and external requirements met.

“I really enjoyed working with the Corporate Citizenship team. They were flexible and tackled the project with passion and enthusiasm. We now have a picture of the external landscape and understand how our reporting meets external requirements and what enhancements we need to make. We also met the criterion to reduce the number of metrics that we report.”

David Baxter, Principal – Analysis and Reporting Safety and Sustainable Development at Anglo American.