Anglo American plc (AAL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everybody, and indeed good morning to some of you. Welcome to our first sustainability update for 2024. Today, I'm going to start, first off, by recapping on our safety performance and then followed a little bit by a review of our strategic priorities and how integral sustainability is to the delivery of those. Helena is then going to come up and she's going to update us all on our 2023 sustainability performance and then talk through how sustainability is set to unlock more value for Anglo American, with a deep focus this time on nature. And to that end, we're going to be joined by Ian Hudson. Ian is our Global Lead on Nature and Land. And then we're going to do a bit of a deep dive to illustrate some of our nature work in practice. I'll come back at the end, wrap things up, and then hopefully, we'll still have some time for questions. Now firstly, to safety, of course. It is, always will be, our #1 value and our #1 priority. We are continuing to make some very good progress towards our goal of zero harm, particularly with the emphasis that we've got now on leadership time in the field. And I think that really is helping to achieve some of the best performance indicators that we've seen in the history of this company, particularly those reflected in terms of total recordable injury frequency rates, as shown in the chart on the left-hand side, here in 2023. But clearly, we had 2 really big incidents during the course of last year and 3 fatalities as a result of those incidents. So there's still a lot more work to do, but I am encouraged here that some of the programs that we seem to be focusing on are indeed not only improving safety but actually delivering some of that stable performance throughout the business. I've said it before, and I'll continue to reiterate it: a stably producing business is also a safe business. So these are the areas that I think are leading to some of those outcomes. I'm going to touch on the work that we're doing in this space, a little bit more on the next slide, but I absolutely want to assure you all at this point that I remain completely committed to achieving our goal of zero harm. I'm also pleased to say that there were no Level 3 incidents or above from an environmental perspective during the course of 2023, and we continue to work with our selected sites across the whole of the portfolio on our predictive environmental monitoring program. Now we've spoken about this before, it's pretty well documented and recorded. But with this program in place, our operations teams there have now been able to move some of this project from pilot stage to full implementation. And where we are fully implemented, the predictive data that comes out of this program is now really embedded deeply into the daily decision-making and operational control systems of those operations, and that is helping to improve the monitoring of the environmental factors but also enabling proactive decisions to be taken to avoid potential incidents. Now on safety, as I said, we continue to review all of the events that we have for key insights and learning opportunities. And specifically, when it comes down to fatalities, there's a doubling-down of the effort, not only we do this on a high-potential instance but certainly on our fatal events. And they are all subject to independently led investigations. And these independently led investigations are staffed or chaired by senior members of the investigating panel that are unrelated with the business that had the incident, so that there is a level of scrutiny and independence associated just with the way we set up these investigations. The idea here is to absolutely understand the gap between work, as we imagine the work to be done at the time that we designed these processes and the standards and we set the equipment up for that work, and how work is actually being done on the frontline. And I think that that's very critical to improving safety. We take actions on those findings, absolutely. So generally learning, what it is that we need to do to improve standards, what it is we need to do to improve work setup, what it is that we need to do from a coaching and development point of view but also in terms of the management of discipline in the context of ensuring that people are following the rules to be safe for themselves and for their coworkers. Now we believe that the 3 key safety levers that we're working on are pretty well positioned in terms of supporting this critical task that we have of ultimately getting to zero harm and getting there rapidly. And the first area, I mentioned briefly on the previous slide, is this area called visible felt leadership. Again, it sounds pretty basic, but the program here is very consistent with the work that we're doing in terms of prioritizing the work of people and simplifying the work of people. And it's all focused on ensuring that our leaders at all levels of the organization are spending sufficient time in the field, being able to have these quality interactions with the whole of the workforce. It is from these engagements, as I said earlier, that we get an improved understanding of both the challenges and the opportunities in terms of how work is being executed in the business but also helps us then manage and design out some of the associated risks of that work. Now these interactions have delivered, I believe, considerable improvements not only in housekeeping and job conditions but also work execution methods and the improved training programs that we're deploying throughout the business. And all of these are contributing to a safer and a more engaged workforce. Secondly, so second of the 3-step programs specifically focused on bringing us to zero harm more rapidly, is this notion of planned work. So planned work is much safer work, and absolutely at the heart of our operating model is this very simple principle, which is plan, do, check and act. Now it applies to all of our activities, but what we've chosen to do for a whole heap of reasons is really index extremely hard on planned maintenance work. So a lot of our diagnosis and analysis of the types of incidents that we're having in the business would show that a lot of it occurs when work is done as a result of breakdowns, for instance, or work is changed to meet a set of current circumstances that hadn't been envisaged before, and we planned differently. So this planned work is very important. Planned maintenance is a very key example of that, so again, leading to the stability of the business, better planned work and safer outcomes for all of our operations. So it allows us to more effectively identify these risks, minimize the unplanned stoppages and make sure that we get the right people and the right skills to be able to execute that work. And the combination of those two things, I believe, is definitely contributing to that reduction in the total recordable injury frequency rate as we've seen it develop over the last year and a bit. Now thirdly, again, our diagnosis in terms of where the incident is occurring and how they're occurring, remote locations in the business and also skewed to our contractor community. I mean at any one particular point in time in Anglo American, we probably have about 1/3 of our workforce which are contractors. And on that basis, we've started to work on the contractor performance management program, which is specifically designed to bring the elements of the operating model that I've just described to you, in terms of plan, do, check and act, to the work that our contractors are doing for us and on our behalf. This, of course, are all our responsibility and our accountability. So Matt, Ruben and Themba have taken this on. It's a 3-year program. We started doing this work during the course of last year. And I'm absolutely certain that as we continue to go along this route, we're probably setting ourselves up for even more success and a more rapid transition to zero harm by ensuring that our contractors, too, are set up for success. And finally, as an organization, given the way that we analyze, given the work that we do in reviewing these sorts of incidents and the findings that come out of them, we continue to focus on sharing these insights not only across the whole of our business, throughout our portfolio, but to the extent that we believe that it's applicable, we also share this with the broader industry generally through the platform of the ICMM. Now in February, I outlined quite clearly where we stand on our 3 strategic priorities. Firstly, and most importantly, is this one of operational excellence. So a little bit of what I've been referring to from a safety perspective also underpins this from a general production performance point of view. So mine plans are very much at the core of our business and the foundation for everything else that we have in the business as far as outcomes are concerned, and we absolutely need to get this right. Now we have gone through a process and are continuing to go through a process of converting the mine plans into more robust mine plans. And that work is well underway, and the transition is going at pace at the moment and proceeding very well. Secondly, we will work also to simplify and improve the quality of our portfolio, and that's work that's happening through the portfolio and asset review during the course of this year. And thirdly, over the longer term, we are focused on delivering and ensuring attractive and highly accretive growth from the organic growth options that we have within the portfolio as it stands today. But as I've said before, we will not compromise our balance sheet nor will we compromise shareholder returns for that growth investment in the short run. Now to be very clear, these strategic priorities do not detract in any way from our focus on sustainability, and we remain absolutely committed due to both the importance to broader society but to Anglo American and the competitive advantage that we believe being a sustainable and a responsible miner brings in or out. Now mining plants, of course, have to be sustainable and they are then a critical enabler for the delivery of these 3 priorities. The execution of our strategy is underpinned by the application of our differentiated capabilities, which have been built over many, many decades in both developing and developed markets. Sustainability is already embedded quite deeply within our strategy and our operations and decisions are made with sustainable outcomes in mind, in live time, in real time, by our operators, all the way up to the directors of this company. It is fundamental, we believe, for us to be able to continue to deliver safe, sustainable and responsible outcomes. These differentiated capabilities span sustainability and the processes that underscore that, certainly from a community, performance management perspective, technology and the belief in the importance of customer-centric marketing. All of these positions us to be the partner of choice. We now have a much more focused and prioritized approach to technology, and that means that we can accelerate the benefits from our recent investments in FutureSmart Mining. We do continue to be technology agnostic and we are focusing on the technologies that we believe can deliver the greatest value to our operations in the first instance. We also have to take a portfolio approach here using our broader portfolio to generate solutions that can be relatively rapidly transferred in a value-accretive way across other elements of the portfolio. Now we believe that sustainability is already, as I said, and will continue to be a prerequisite for value creation in this industry. These considerations are embedded into the strategy and from portfolio choices to everyday operational decisions. It's a live thing for us. Along with our portfolio review, we are assessing the implications for our sustainability strategy but only so that we can further strengthen delivery and unlock even more value to the business as well as to have a much more positive impact for our stakeholders. Now we plan on sharing an update on this at our next sustainability update to the market in October later this year. Sustainability has delivered direct financial value to this business through NPV positive solutions and operational continuity. In the midterm, sustainability helps us to reduce risk and provides access to or sustains access to resources with an opportunity to create real long-term value by linking sustainability directly to the strategic choices that we embed within the portfolio. Now we see sustainability as enabling value to our business through both the strategic and operational levers that I mentioned before. And there are many examples, but I'd just like to highlight a few. The first of these being resource access. So our reputation as a sustainable operator and our FutureSmart approach to minimize mining footprint of all of our operations, have, I believe, been a fundamental factor in the development of projects such as Quellaveco, and currently Woodsmith and ultimately will be Sakatti. If you consider the work that we did on Quellaveco and how that got approved and how it got ramped up the work that we are doing on Woodsmith in terms of being able to sustain and manage those licenses in a very, very biodiversity sensitive area and the fact that we are well advanced with the permitting process in Sakatti in a very challenging permitting environment, I think these all speak to the requirements or the benefits of a reputation of a sustainable operator in terms of resource access. Now we did speak to you in some detail about this in our last sustainability update in October, so we won't cover it much this time, but it's a very, very important point. The second is market access. So the traceability of our product and the assurance via certification of our responsible approach are examples of product characteristics that our customers are starting to value more and more. Now Helena is going to speak a little bit more on our progress on certification shortly. And then the third element here is minimizing the impacts of social disruption to ongoing operations and projects. And we've all seen the impacts of this specifically related to the jurisdictions that we operate in where strong stakeholder collaboration and performance leads to much smoother permitting processes and definitely strengthens stakeholder trust. We've seen the value of this very recently in Brazil, in Peru and in South Africa. So long-run cost efficiency is the last point that I'd like to make, and this is just one example here where we reduce ultimately the closure costs of our operations through the integration of the rehabilitation into the short- and the medium-term planning of the mines. So when I say it's a live and ongoing thing, that's exactly what I mean. And Ian is going to talk a little bit more about this and provide a few more insights to this a little bit later on in this presentation. So I believe that this approach is absolutely key to demonstrating to our host communities, to governments, to customers, to partners, as well as to current and future shareholders, what responsible and sustainable mining really looks and feels like. Now the focus today is to deep dive into some of our work on nature and how we think about this at a strategic level and how we use our broader portfolio to generate these solutions in a value-accretive way. But before we get to that, and Ian takes us throughout, I'm going to hand over to Helena who will just give us a brief update on our 2023 sustainability performance. Helena, over to you.

Thank you, Duncan, and good afternoon, everybody. It's a great opportunity to update you on the progress in sustainability space, so thank you all for making the time today. So most of you are familiar with our sustainable mining plan framework and its 3 pillars of healthy environment, thriving communities and trusted corporate leader. Under each of these pillars, there are stretch goals that I'll talk about in a moment. But as Duncan said, sustainability is central to our value creation strategy both in the short and in the long term. But we focus not only on what we do and the impact we want to have but on how we deliver on our ambition. So we aim to deliver on our commitments in a value-accretive way by working with partners and by embedding sustainability considerations directly into our operational plans at an asset level, which is critical in turning our ambitions into value-creating outcomes. And I will now look to highlight just our performance against some of the key targets within this framework. So I will start with climate, and this is the chart that you are all familiar with, and we've used it in our reporting to reflect our projected trajectory to carbon neutrality. And we've consistently emphasized that this progress will not be linear because we continue to evolve and we understand fully the technological options and tackle the challenges we face but also the opportunities that we see. And as with any projection, we can predict more accurately the short term than the longer term. So comparing our current performance to 2019 when our emissions peaked, we delivered a 26% reduction in our total Scope 1 and 2 emissions. So our emissions now stand 7% below the 2016 baseline and improvements in the management of methane and our steelmaking coal business have made the largest contribution to this reduction in emissions in the last year. And this is building on the work conducted over several years to capture methane before mining and using that gas to produce electricity for residents around our mines. As an example, electricity production arising from methane capture is currently 140 megawatts, which is equivalent to powering 100,000 households in Queensland per year. And as the majority of our coal mines are underground, it allows us to capture the majority of the methane that is present. And through continuous improvement in our understanding and management of methane, we have virtually eliminated flaring in the last year, reducing emission and capturing more gas for beneficial use. And we will continue this work while also focusing on the more difficult technical challenge of capturing the dilute gas that we currently ventilate for safety reasons, the so-called ventilated air methane. Completing the rollout of the renewable energy in South America in 2023 was also a significant milestone on climate, which has taken our total of renewable-sourced electricity down to 53%. Despite the reductions in South America, the electricity purchased segment, which is shown in purple on this chart, remain unchanged. But this is due to increased electricity consumption in South Africa, which was a result of restarting a number of processing plants that were initially shut down in 2022. And so then the next stage of moving to renewable supply will come in 2025 when our Australian operations will switch to the new supplier, Stanwell. And we are, of course, making good progress on electricity supply in South Africa. Our jointly owned renewable energy venture with EDF Renewables, called Envusa Energy, aims to generate 3 to 5 gigawatts of renewable energy, which is approximately 9% of Eskom's current capacity. The venture has completed the project financing for its first 3 wind and solar projects earlier this year, as we've told you earlier. And these 3 renewable energy projects, which are known as Koruson 2 cluster of projects, will have a total capacity of 520 megawatt of wind and solar electricity generation. And so delivery of the pipeline of projects through Envusa and continued improvements in our methane management and abatement of methane emissions will be key to delivering on our 2030 climate target. Now moving on to water. On water usage, in water scarce regions, we are currently 22% below our 2015 baseline usage, which is a great result. And we are making a great progress, but as you would expect, this progress is not always linear due to multiple factors outside of our control, which include operational requirements and changing precipitation levels. So moving forward, annual variability is expected until such time as major freshwater savings and replacement projects that are currently underway are completed, but we are still on track to meet our 2030 target of a 50% reduction in freshwater withdrawals. And we are committed to ensuring that the water resources we manage and the savings we achieve by reducing freshwater withdrawals translate to additional water availability in ways that are socially equitable, environmentally sustainable and economically beneficial to our communities. Our water efficiency increased from 82% in 2022 to 84% in 2023, and our operations continue to improve their water reuse and recycling rates, such as the Los Bronces solution, which is reducing their reliance on freshwater. And now I'd like to talk about some of our socioeconomic development work, which is, of course, deeply ingrained in our corporate DNA since 1970s when the Chairman's fund was first established. So through the implementation of our social performance management system, which is called Social Way, which we believe is one of the most robust and comprehensive management systems in the mining sector, but also through our collaborative regional development platforms, we are working actively to support local and regional economies as well as the lives and livelihoods of the communities where we operate. So one of the things we've come to understand is that to make a meaningful impact, we need to have a much bigger ambition than companies traditionally had. And our approach has moved us away from isolated, one-off projects done on our own to an approach that focuses now on four things: firstly, longer-term projects; secondly, focusing on economic diversification beyond mining; thirdly is the implementation at scale through partnerships who bring expertise, credibility, legitimacy with stakeholders and importantly, access to new funding pools; and finally, inclusive governance. But we don't believe, as I said earlier, that higher ambition needs necessarily to mean much higher cost to the business. While the traditional approach to supporting community development was through social investment, there are now other sources of funding that we have consistently and successfully been mobilizing, which includes grants from other organization and commercial sources of finance. For example, our Impact Finance Network has developed a track record in South Africa as the leading technical assistance and matching program with a consistent and growing pipeline of small businesses. What it does, it uses catalytic capital to unlock commercial capital and investment to support non-mine dependent jobs and economic diversification in our host communities, provinces and countries. So it leverages approximately $15 from third-parties for every $1 spent that we spend or we invest to support jobs. And we have now expanded this work to Latin America, with first pilots being implemented now in Chile and Peru. Our initiatives are all designed to provide long-term job opportunities in communities and jobs that are independent of our mines. And to date, we have supported 139,000 off-site jobs, and we expect that number to continue to grow. So we are absolutely on track to meet our 2025 livelihood targets of supporting 3 jobs off-site for every job on site. And in parallel with that, we continue to invest in health care, education and importantly, institutional capacity development, which are all essential for communities to be able to embrace those new opportunities created. So our existing socioeconomic development work and capabilities are providing a strong platform for the social response activities in South Africa. So despite the challenging business context and the organizational restructuring that is currently underway, we are committed to playing our part, contributing to long-term community development in the areas where we operate, working in partnership to ensure sustainable development. And now moving on to our trusted corporate leader pillar and critical foundations of our sustainable mining plan. By the end of 2023, we exceeded our consolidated target of 33% female representation across the business for our management population, reaching 34%. So we have seen positive improvements year-on-year on other key performance metrics, such as the percentage of women in the workforce, which increased to 26% in 2023, up from 24% in 2022, and we will continue to build on this progress. And as Duncan said, as our customers increasingly care not just about what they buy but about how the products were produced, our goal for 2025 is for all operations to undergo third-party audits against recognized responsible mine certification systems. And some of the most recent achievements that I'd like to highlight is for our sites that were assessed against the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, or IRMA, which is one of the most comprehensive mining standards. Our Mototolo and Amandelbult mines in South Africa became the first PGM mines in the country to complete the audits, and they achieve IRMA 75 and IRMA 50 level of performance, respectively. IRMA has also confirmed our Unki Mine that our Unki Mine retains its IRMA 75 level of performance. And lastly, in February, we announced that our Minas-Rio and Barro Alto mines in Brazil are the first iron ore and nickel-producing mines in the world to complete an IRMA audit, and both mines achieved the IRMA 75 level of performance. But what's important to keep in mind is the implementation of our own standards and policies that ensure that we can meet these comprehensive third-party assessments, with those audits acting as an independent assurance that gives comfort to our customers and our stakeholders of our high standards. So now moving on to our work on nature, which is the focus of this update, as Duncan said. Within our sustainable mining plan healthy environment pillar, we have a commitment to deliver net positive impact on biodiversity across Anglo American by 2030. And in a moment, Ian is going to talk to the progress that we are making to deliver this goal. Globally, we think that the nature agenda is continuing to gain momentum, with increased recognition of the threats to nature, its societal importance and the value it can bring through nature-based solution to tackle climate change impacts. Nature loss is also a major driver of the lack of trust in the mining industry, which is a huge issue, of course. However, a recent ICMM survey showed that it has also been seen as a significant opportunity area to help restore society trust, with action on nature being the most important thing the sector could do to change this negative perception of mining. And as a company, we understand the business case for nature and biodiversity, and we have been focused on this since well before 2018 when we set our biodiversity stretch goal in the sustainable mining plan. Firstly, we believe that the health of our business is dependent on a healthy environment where the health of nature through land, water, air and biodiversity provide key ecosystem services to both our assets, which, of course, helps to reduce costs, as well as through the wider landscape and society. Secondly, we believe that focusing on integrated materials stewardship plans encourages concurrent rehabilitation, which reduces our closure liabilities. Ian will give you some examples in a few moments. And finally, we see a growing number of opportunities to generate revenue such as through forestry and carbon credits. And we have seen examples of finally being recognized across our portfolio, and I will just highlight a few before I hand over to Ian. So firstly, through our approach to water stewardship program. Programs like our integrated water security project in Chile and our water beneficiation project in our Kumba Iron Ore operations also support broader community and stakeholder needs in terms of helping them to address the challenges related to water scarcity and water quality. And we, of course, have a range of nature-based solution activities across our portfolio instead of using higher-cost technologies, for example, using microbes to improve water quality in Platinum and Australia through to using our waste materials and land to improve soil quality and overall ecosystem productivity. And we also recognize the importance of data and disclosures and the use of the new standards and frameworks. As we have seen with the launch of the Task Force for Nature-related Financial Disclosures, or TNFD, at the end of 2022. Anglo American was selected as a TNFD task force member and it continues to play a role in both the sector and corporate level. And we have also been very involved and supportive of the ICMM recently launched Nature Positive position statement. So to conclude, systems-based approach to nature reduces risk and costs, aligning to our strategic objective of delivering on our sustainability ambitions in a value-accretive manner. And we would now like to share some of the additional detail of our progress in this area and some further actions that we have taken across our portfolio. And with that, I would like to hand over to Ian. Thank you.

Thank you, Helena. So with nature playing such a pivotal role in adding value to the business but also in restoring trust for the mining sector, I wanted to provide a short summary of some of the actions we've taken to date and also our progress towards our 2030 net positive impact commitment. So by way of a short recap, our journey to net positive biodiversity gains in the areas where we operate started well before our goal in 2018 with our first biodiversity standard. Now in its third version, our standard is defining how we measure, assess and manage biodiversity. It's critical that the biodiversity aspects are incorporated into all facets of an operation. And we do this from mine planning through to project concept, detailed engineering, technical innovation and all along the value chain, working with our suppliers and with our customers. We completed our detailed baseline assessments across our managed operations and we defined and assessed those significant biodiversity features, habitat and key species and the important ecosystems to protect and further restore. And from this deep and detailed data, we've developed comprehensive biodiversity management programs for every site, and we have these plans independently reviewed by some of our NGO partners as part of our ongoing improvement process. The plans are adding value beyond just our own site work, and we're transferring innovative concepts across the portfolio. And whether that be supporting key species and habitat research or adding to our land holdings into an internationally important conservation strategies, we recognize positive outcomes for nature are both needed and integral to our business. So as Helena mentioned, there is an appropriate and needed increased focus on data and disclosure driving the nature agenda at the moment. And one of the biggest challenges in this area has been measurement. Calculating net positive impact and managing nature certainly requires a currency or metric in order to quantify and qualify biodiversity lost and gained, that this must rely on defensible and measurable units that are both science-based and transparent. To this end, we're in our fourth year of our industry-leading environmental DNA program, sampling water, soil and even air down to a microbial level to help us assess and monitor the environment across our sites, exploration locations and even some of our port locations. This has enabled us to understand our operational ecology to a level of detail not possible before, and it's an enabling and enhanced species and habitat level approach to our management of biodiversity. We have over 2,500 sampling programs across the business to date, and we've made tens of thousands of those eDNA records globally available through our support of programs like the E-Bioatlas, alongside some of our long-term partners, IUCN and Nature Metrics. We believe this is important in adding overall information to the global knowledge base as well as supporting information for our own operating areas. We've also been winning some awards for this along the way for our approach to using artificial intelligence to support nature. So since our last update, we've also continued to refine our measurement processes, and we've developed a new science-based aggregated metric with 2 of our NGO partners as a solution for supporting our net positive impact and nature positive outcome work. The metric we've called quality habitat hectares is based on a strong foundation of very detailed data. It's down to species and ecosystem, habitat and location type, but it's also weighted for importance and significance both locally, regionally and internationally. It allows us to have a clear position on loss and gain to be visualized and projected, and we can analyze this against time, which gives us real strong visibility against the mechanisms for loss and gain, and we can better assess and use these across the group. So to support a more consistent approach to nature, we've also shared our work on the QHH approach with some of our JV partners and we're also doing through some of our peer networks, as Helena mentioned, like the TNFD, our work with UNEP and also our work with the ICMM. The feedback has been really positive, and we definitely see key data as a driving force for collective action on nature and so that nature is very much a collaborative and not competitive space. So I'd now like to take you on a quick tour of some of our assets across the business, and I'm proud to be able to share some of the work and use cases that our teams are working on at the moment out in the field. So our first port of call is our Sishen Iron ore mine located within the Northern Cape of South Africa. And here, we're using innovative rehabilitation approaches from the integration of rehab considerations into our waste rock management and infrastructure designs. We're using geomorphic landforms that provide improved performance against climate change scenarios, and they also are offering wider post-mining land uses. This work is bringing together both remote modeling and on-ground activities. Our rehab work at Sishen is giving us a detailed understanding of our mineral waste streams. That's allowing us to selectively handle waste so that we can improve rehabilitation and land-use outcomes. We can minimize potential environmental impacts as well as identifying ways to value opportunities. These strategies around material movement are delivering reduced footprints, improved rehab outcomes while also driving material management costs down by up to 50%. And we're obviously looking to share these learnings as deliberately as possible across our portfolio to drive even more value. So this innovation and action generates not only new mining land-use opportunities, but it's also facilitating improved biodiversity values and enabling the growth of things like higher-value cash crops for some of those post-mining land-use and livelihood opportunities that Helena just mentioned. We've observed our rehab program resulting in improvements to environmental impacts as well and from a reduction in noise, from a reduction in dust, alongside improvements in surface water quality as well as positive stakeholder feedback on the visual amenity improvements. We'd like to think we're setting an example of not being a progressively green island in a stream. We've also established local relationships with businesses and communities to develop skills and include participation within our value chain. This is supporting our biodiversity objectives but also supporting job creation in areas like rehabilitation contracts where we're growing community-based competencies to run our tree and shrub nurseries, undertake invasive species control, erosion repair, seeding and planting activities, all designed to enhance our performance but, at the same time, improve resiliency across the communities and also promote biodiversity awareness. Our innovative planning has also allowed us to utilize our landforms for different purposes. One such purpose is a solar farm, which was preventing the disturbance of hundreds of hectares of native vegetation and other lands by using the existing mine footprints available to us. The solar farm project designs are using nature-based solutions to generate biodiversity and livelihood gains while also delivering 65 megawatts of much needed reliable and renewable energy. So moving now to our Australia operations. At Anglo American, as Duncan mentioned, we're always looking to deploy technology and innovation to improve the safety, efficiency and outcomes of our operations and projects. Traditional rehab monitoring practices usually represent only 10% of the total area or footprint. And these methods previously used can lead to sampling biases, can also expose state to safety risks working in remote location. We've been partnering with innovative remote sensing service providers to utilize landscape data and capture opportunities using satellites, aircraft and drone technology, along with machine learning programs, to monitor and implement adaptive rehabilitation management. The landscape scale data is providing greater repeatability on assurance of our rehab activities and performance while also improving safety outcomes for staff and our service providers as we don't need to access every hectare for sampling. So in 2023, these innovative trials in Australia have enabled us to drop thousands of native tree and shrub species, encapsulated in purposefully designed seed pods over our rehabilitated waste rock areas. And using the AI, we've been able to design and test the best application and intervention treatments possible. And we've been combining this with some of our other nature-based solutions work on soil creation from waste materials that Helena mentioned. It's giving us a truly circular and multi-benefit result, and we're already transferring this to other sites around the business as we see significant improvement in cost and quality as well as that reduction in risk. We're also actively continuing to form partnerships with research bodies, NGOs and community bodies and experts to maximize the outcomes from our operations. This is exposing us to continue new ways of thinking and it's also ensuring that we're delivering on more than just a one-dimensional outcome to meet and exceed the stakeholder expectations around us. We are deeply aware that the success of rehab and its impact on nature and land across the industry is a key pillar in maintaining our social license to operate. It's also an enabler that allows us to look at expansion and transition into future land uses and operations in the future, and it's something we need to collaborate on within and beyond our industry. So whether that be from utilizing floating vegetation to improve water quality and boost biodiversity and creating habitats around pit lakes and post-mining water structures, through to the community training programs we've been developing to bring new job opportunities in areas like the management of our state-of-the-art remote environmental monitoring program rooms as well as citizen science data collection around our operations. I think we continue to demonstrate this brings a lower cost of operations, reduced closure liabilities, as mentioned, but also that improved community and government relationships that are needed to support future business activities across our group. So I'm going to move locations now to Brazil. I would like to talk a little bit about how we're building on our significant knowledge of the biodiversity of that region and the proactive role in conservation and stewardship that we've been taking and the benefits of how that biodiversity and ecosystem services knowledge is being deployed through nature-based solutions to drive multiple co-benefits across carbon, nature, water and society at scale. So in the Mata Atlántica, we operate in a biome that is as rich as the Amazon but where less than 10% of that original forest remains intact due to pressures from non-mining activities like agriculture and forestry. While mining footprints are comparatively small, we believe we can play a positive role. We already have over 20,000 hectares of this important biome under our management. So across our operations in Brazil, we undertake compensation and restoration works to increase that local biodiversity surrounding our operations. We've also engaged in this work for a long time and we understand the environment and its precious, but also its opportunities, very well. So with our focused approach to planting native species from locally sourced seed and relocated plant species, again, grown in our own community operated nurseries, we've been restoring former farmland and degraded landscapes, controlling invasive species and establishing secondary forests with improved habitat and biodiversity complexity. So it's building all of this information and that detailed work that we've done to map and understand the environment, the biomes around us, that we've been able to develop a range of programs that are addressing multiple value drivers for the business, and the community more broadly, in this region. So not only is our ecosystem restoration program bringing back the crucial Mata Atlántica forest but it's also able to deliver positive carbon and biodiversity impacts at the same time. We have a 250-hectare program already completed where we're assessing the carbon sequestration potential of our work and also the importance of the health of the soil and the improvements that we're seeing in the microbial ecosystem. And we're really encouraged about the positive results that we're seeing already. We're looking to partnerships to scale up the replanting to an excess of 2,000 hectares per year, and ultimately, we plan to deliver more than 600,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year but importantly, also to continue to drive those significant biodiversity outcomes and opportunities for our broader stakeholders. So we recognize the need to ensure this approach is also sustainable for the long term. And as part of the program design, we're collaborating through agroforestry with surrounding communities to bring additional revenue streams and to produce a more replicable and scalable business model. So as we look to our increased operations in Brazil through our combination of the Serpentina asset and our Minas Rio operations, programs like these will only be enhanced and show the role that we can play in providing a much wider sphere of positive impacts beyond our mine operation. These are just a small set of examples of where our deliberate integrated approach to sustainability, and in this case nature, is producing net positive outcomes through our operations on biodiversity, on water and carbon, alongside those community opportunities for meaningful employment and sustainable business models for post-mine life continuity. We think it clearly demonstrates that there's a significant business value from our work in nature and land. So with my short talk concluded, I'd like to hand back to Duncan. Thanks.

Thank you, Ian. That was very comprehensive. The work we're doing in this nature space, I think, and more broadly across the full spectrum of sustainability, really does support our strategy and helps us to live up to the needs and the expectations of a very broad and diverse set of stakeholders across the planet. So the execution of our strategy is absolutely underpinned by the application of what we see to be our differentiated capabilities. And to reiterate, sustainability for us is not just about specific tools, programs, technologies or activities. It is an embedded core competency, which has been built up over several decades, that we embed now into the way we design, into the way we develop and into the way that we operate our assets and the way that we market our products. We do rigorously track and measure our progress towards these targets and our ambitions. And our focus is also on strengthening our level of confidence in delivering these and their desired impact in a way that drives both sustainable and profitable business outcomes. And with that, thank you very much for your attention, and we do have a bit of time for any questions. So operator, happy to open the lines for any Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Richard Hatch from Berenberg.

Just a question on the net community impact on the cumulative number of jobs supported by the off-site. Just wondering, just with the Section 189 in Anglo Plat and Kumba, how you're dealing with that sort of added kind of impact in the South African operations.

Sure, Richard. Thanks for the question. I mean as you know, the ambition there is ultimately to get to 5 jobs off-site for every 1 job on site. So it's a ratio and it's a relative metric. But ultimately, at the end of the day, we think that the embedded sustainability programs, particularly the impact catalyst program and the collaborative development program that we've got, which was always intended to try and make a community sustainable outside of mining, will continue in the way that we've designed them and, at the same time, in the way that I think Helena described a little bit earlier where we try and leverage the investment into these things relative to our own investments in them. So certainly, in terms of our short-term targets, we don't see any material impact on this thing, but we're really committed to driving to the ambition of 5 for every 1, despite the restructuring that we're doing in South Africa.

[Operator Instructions] As of right now, we don't have any questions raised. I'd now like to hand back over to Duncan. Duncan, please proceed.

Thank you very much, operator. Look, again, thank you, everybody, for your time. This is a really important topic. It's a very important part of who we are as a company, and a great pleasure to share it all with you today. So thanks very much and wish you all well. Go well and speak again soon.