Gold Company – Sustainability Report

Limited Website Content Leads to Lack of Awareness of ESG Efforts

When browsing the website of this gold company, it is evident that it has one of the largest resource bases of gold, copper and silver in the world.  What was not so evident in 2020, however, was how much effort the company was investing in ESG (environmental, social and governance) throughout their projects.  Their website contained limited content relating to their sustainability efforts and did not reflect the planning, effort and commitment the company was applying in practice to manage their ESG risks.

From an outside perspective, they were not disclosing their material nonfinancial data – in other words, their ESG performance data. The little content they had on their website relating to ESG was worded in vague, general terms. A lack of content, or the use of altruistic language, can convey tokenism or greenwashing to the public, which can raise questions as to how serious the company is about the issue.

When investors research a company, they look for tangible evidence of a commitment to ESG as a way to gauge risk. Without data to demonstrate this commitment, they are often forced to conclude that the company is either not assessing or not managing their nonfinancial risks. The company wanted investors and the public to see the reality of their considerable commitment to ESG, and recognized they needed to rectify the issue with some urgency.

Establishing an ESG Reporting System for the Present and the Future

The company contacted SOOP Strategies Inc. for assistance.  SOOP are specialists in ESG and sustainability within the extractives sector. After assessing the company’s website and reviewing their ESG work to date, SOOP’s advice was to first establish a sustainability framework and ESG reporting system that the company could build upon as they grew, particularly with regard to an upcoming potential joint venture involving their project in Northwestern British Columbia.

Having a sustainability framework and reporting process in place would mean that, in advance of a joint venture, the company would be organized for ESG, and would also be ready to anticipate the many ESG risks associated with project development thereafter.

Identifying the company’s ESG issues and establishing the ESG performance metrics would also allow the company to demonstrate to investors, local communities, governments and indeed, the world, that they had a readiness and commitment to managing ESG risks.

Goal Setting and a Strategic Plan for Sustainability

SOOP also worked with the company on goal setting and a Sustainability Strategy. These would help the company set tangible targets to work towards, and create a plan to achieve them. The process involved multiple planning sessions with key members of the company’s leadership team in order to set the goals, and develop action items and assign tasks to achieve those goals.

As part of the process and for comparison purposes, SOOP carried out a benchmarking exercise of industry peers to gauge the plans they had in place. With this information, they worked with the company to determine which goals they wanted to focus on that would put them on par with, or ahead of, their peers.

Once these were established, SOOP then worked to ensure that the goals met all requirements of jurisdictional, industry and professional expectations.

Hard Work Triumphs with Perseverance

This was an in-depth procedure for their team.  Like many first-time reporting companies,   this was their initial introduction to a process that required detailed ESG data collection from multiple sources and that could, at times, feel overwhelming. However, with SOOP’s support and guidance, they overcame the demands of the rigorous exercise with determination and great success.

Numerous stages were involved that required coordinated arrangements with many parties. Multiple leadership sessions, facilitated by SOOP, took place with the board of directors and executive leadership. A great number of individual interviews were undertaken with both internal and external stakeholders. And metrics had to be selected that were suitable for the stage of their project and the size of the company, metrics that would be expected and recognized by investors and companies (for the scenario of a possible joint venture).

• Company's website content did not reflect their true commitment to sustainability.
• Goal: create Sustainability Report to raise awareness of their ESG engagement.

Inaugural ESG Report is Published

Recognizing that investors are averse to risk and rely heavily on data and details to minimize those risks, the company needed an information-heavy vehicle to tell their ESG story. SOOP Strategies recommended presenting it in a report format that would include the detailed reporting process capturing the company’s ESG strategy, their pathways towards critical targets, and their ESG performance.

As a result, SOOP started compiling the company’s inaugural 2020 ESG Report to communicate their ESG planning and results on the 2020 performance year. 2020 was in fact an extremely important year to report on ESG to the investor community and the public as the COVID-19 pandemic had upended the world. The mining industry was no exception, particularly with regard to protecting human capital, and exposing vulnerabilities in supply chain management, areas that investors were especially focused on. The pandemic only emphasized further the need for strong and integrated ESG management.

A Story Built Around Data

SOOP’s ESG solution involved a comprehensive process to ascertain the company’s material ESG issues, map those issues to the appropriate ESG disclosure frameworks (as expected by the company’s investors), and write the company’s sustainability story to reflect and support the data. Information to fulfill the ESG metrics was collected from the company’s sites and headquarters, analyzed, and published in the inaugural ESG Report.

As well as producing hard copies for distribution to their investors and other stakeholders, SOOP also recommended that the ESG Report be produced in a downloadable PDF format from the company’s corporate website. In SOOP’s experience, many investment analysts, ESG analysts and third-party ratings agencies, among others, rely on the “Ctrl-F” search function to analyze documents and maneuver around the data swiftly and easily; as a result, ESG web pages that include this feature are viewed as efficient and helpful.

ESG Materiality Process Leads to a Sustainability Policy

As an integral part of this project, SOOP Strategies also recommended developing the company’s Sustainability Policy. SOOP’s materiality process for ESG reporting involved company and context research, stakeholder interviews, and leadership engagement, all of which could be conveniently leveraged to develop the Sustainability Policy in addition to the ESG Report.

A Sustainability Policy is a critical first step on the pathway to proactively managing ESG risks and ensuring that sustainability is integrated into a company’s business. Publicly, a Sustainability Policy demonstrates to investors and other key stakeholders that the company is formally committed to being proactive in managing and mitigating their ESG risks. This tangible result would hold them accountable, whether it be from corporate boards or from the public.

Improved Investor Experience Thanks to Clear ESG Reporting

SOOP’s depth of experience was instrumental in guiding the company through the intricate steps required, advising on the multitude of information to gather, where to source it, and eventually collating it into a robust and detailed report. It captured the extensive work involved in the comprehensive materiality process from conception through to final production of their Sustainability Strategy, as well as the design of the resulting Sustainability Policy.

When the company originally approached SOOP, it was with the desire to produce a sustainability program that included a strategy, a policy, and a report covering the year 2020. However, with the depth of information they collected, and the desire to show their ESG efforts to date to the fullest, they decided to include data for the first nine months of 2021 in the report as well.  The result was their 2020-Q3 2021 Inaugural Sustainability Report.  SOOP went on to produce their subsequent report for the last quarter of 2021 too (Q4-2021 Sustainability Report Supplement).

The company’s commitment to ESG and sustainability is now in full evidence on their website, allowing all stakeholders to make informed decisions about their performance as a company. Their dedicated hard work to produce these reports and to create awareness of their commitment to sustainability have allowed them to develop an ESG reporting framework that will serve them well for years to come.