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ESG FOCUS

Unlocking the

sustainability riddle

by Michael Washbourne

he mining industry is unlikely to have ever seen a job portfolio While companies such as West Africa-focused Perseus have
Tas diverse and as complex as sustainability. long adhered to implementing sustainable practices across
Geologists are primarily responsible for geology. Likewise other multiple aspects of their business, investors are now demanding
site-based roles such as metallurgists, drillers, surveyors and more transparency and communication around anything related
mining engineers who have only ever had to focus on the specific to ESG.
task at hand. It is not just limited to investors. Minerals Council of Australia
Sustainability is a department which has taken on significantly (MCA) general manager sustainability Chris McCombe said
greater importance in recent times, encapsulating everything communities were becoming “increasingly assertive” of their
from gender and cultural diversity to environment and community rights and having a strong influence on whether some projects
relations, and even responsible sourcing of materials and get off the ground.
transparency of supply chains. “We need to ensure that what we do in this space in terms of
meeting some of those investor requirements and so on is also
translatable to the local communities within which we work,”
McCombe told the panel via video link from Sydney.
“ESG performance supports growth of your company but also
future land access. Environmental issues are becoming big
factors in delaying or stopping projects and communities are
becoming increasingly assertive of their rights. And this is all
happening at a time when there is increasing demand for mining
to support the very, very large decarbonisation agenda.
“We only need to look at some examples in the US, some very
large Tier-1 copper deposits which have been delayed or halted
because of some ESG issues. These are Tier-1 deposits and two
Sustainability Unlocked: Paydirt and GMJ editor Dominic Piper mines alone would supply perhaps half of the US’s entire copper
quizzes panellists Trigg Mining’s Keren Paterson, Perseus consumption.”
Mining’s Jessica Volich, Perenti Global’s Alex Atkins and the
Minerals Council of Australia’s Chris McCombe, who joined the
discussion via video link

The complexity of the role is something Perseus Mining Ltd group
general manager sustainability Jessica Volich has come to truly
appreciate. Speaking at the March edition of Paydirt Unlocked,
she revealed the sustainability portfolio was one many companies
still find hard to define and explain.
“Sustainability has such a really wide scope, and it is a bit
Jessica Volich
undefined because it relates to everything,” Volich said.
“My approach coming into Perseus initially was just to do a In many respects, sustainability and ESG requirements now sit
stocktake of where the company was at with sustainability, using alongside safety as a key performance indicator for most mining
some of the great frameworks that have been developed across companies.
the industry. Mining engineer Alex Atkins, who is a non-executive director
“The conclusion I came to quite quickly with Perseus was because for leading contractor Perenti Global Ltd and minerals sands
all the projects had been done to international environmental developer Strandline Resources Ltd, urged all stakeholders not
and social impact assessment requirements, a lot of the stuff to lower their commitments to safety as an indirect trade-off to the
was already there. The thing that maybe hadn’t been done was more intense focus on ESG.
packaging it up and telling the story in a way that investors and “I do believe ESG is a more mature version of what we focused
other stakeholders could actually understand.” on before which was purely safety, but what worries me is that

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