Barrick Mining Corporation (ABX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

We're excited to share our performance and look forward to a good discussion today. I'd first just introduce the team for today's session from Barrick in addition to me as President and CEO. We have Grant Beringer, who is our Sustainability Executive; our Group Sustainability Manager, Duncan Pettit; and our newly appointed Group Head of Health and Safety, Detlev Van Der Veen. Unlike previous years, we won't spend time speaking through our sustainability covenants. And if you have attended before or read our sustainability report, you will know this well. Instead, today, we aim to give you an overview of how we have achieved sustainable delivery, and we'll focus on our key objectives, material aspects and results on the ground. This we believe will add the most value to you. Before we get into this performance, I felt it necessary to remind you of our global footprint and the diverse geographies and cultures within which we work. The drivers of our business are our Tier 1 operations: Kibali in DRC, Loulo-Gounkoto Complex in Mali, Pueblo Viejo in the Dominican Republic as well as the Nevada Gold Mines complex. We have a further Tier 1 gold assets in the making with North Mara and Bulyanhulu complex in Tanzania. We also have the two Tier 2 gold operations of Hemlo in Canada, Honglad in Cote d'Ivoire and Veladero in Argentina. In addition, there's Paul Groman in Papua New Guinea, which is now in the final stretch to restarting and has the real potential to meet Tier 1 status. While gold is the world's most precious metal, I've always maintained that copper is rapidly becoming the most strategic metal. And we own the Lumwana gold -- copper mine in Zambia, which we are planning to expand and move towards a Tier 1 asset. And Jabal Sayid in Saudi Arabia is another key operation where we have increased our exploration footprint and are looking to expand this operation. And finally, over the last year, we have concluded a framework agreement for the development of the Reko Diq Papa gold project in Balochistan, Pakistan, an exciting project which will be one of the world's larger copper operations and will deliver value to a remote region of Pakistan. Often, sustainability is dealt with, in its individual components. At Barrick, however, we recognize the interlinks between each aspect and apply holistic thinking when tackling sustainability. A key focus of our sustainability report and in line with this holistic approach is that we have integrated the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals, or SDGs, throughout our report. In this way, we can demonstrate how our business activities contribute to, or impact against the achievement of specific SDGs. The SDGs are critical global goals that need to be achieved if we are to live in a world that we inhabit. Despite the collective and global commitment to the SDGs, I feel the progress towards the SDGs have been placed on a shelf and forgotten about, a set of goals that the world bodies will [adjust to] towards the end of the decade. And then global leaders will ask what went wrong and why didn't we achieve these? For us, that is not acceptable. There needs to be greater retention and tracking against our collective and global progress. Something we are resolutely sure of is that mining is the flywheel for development. And therefore, the entire industry is critical to the achievement of these SDGs. We also want to demonstrate that mining is not important just because of the green transition. But perhaps more importantly, our responsible mining has a positive and transformative impact on global development and uplifting of disadvantaged communities. It is for these reasons that we changed the core focus of our sustainability report away from the endless indices of reporting frameworks that muddy the waters of ESG, to instead focus on the SDGs and showcase our impact on and contributions to society. That is not to say we don't still use and align to GRE, SASB and TSFD standards as these are all still important, but the way in which we measure our performance is now rooted in contributions to society. I will now hand it over to Grant to take you through our sustainability performance for 2022.

Thank you, Mark. Before running through some key numbers, I wanted to detail where you can find all our sustainability data, which is disaggregated at a site level as well as the governance aspects. Alongside the shift in narrative and framework focus, we also work to adjust the way we structure some of our content and make it available for you digitally. We moved a lot of the governance information about policies, procedures and processes out of the report and on to the website. Our governance structure is stable and has been fully embedded since the merger. And thus, we felt it unnecessary to include it in the report itself. This information has instead been put on the website under a section called Management Approaches. The web page has set out how we implement our policies and are available electronically to those of you that use it in your ESG-based rating. I'd also like to draw your attention to the document library that includes all other auxiliary information from our detailed environmental and social data at an asset level to [ ensure ] current statements, tailings facility inventories and archive and supporting of books. I'm sure by now that you are all aware of our industry-first sustainability scorecard. This is an important mechanism for us to measure our performance on the metrics we believe are most important for ourselves and the industry at large and which benchmarks our progress against our peers, as defined in our MD&A. The scorecard also accounts for 25% of the long-term incentive awards for senior leaders. It is worth mentioning that in line with our philosophy of continuous improvement, new metrics will be integrated into the scorecard for 2023. These include progress against our Journey to Zero safety program, measuring the increase in national procurement year-on-year, the percentage of recommendations completed from independent human rights assessments, and the increase in female representation throughout our workforce. As you can see during 2022, we achieved a B grade, reflecting the progress we have made but also showing that there's still room for improved. We will circle back through this presentation to share some case studies that speak to the contribution towards these metrics. In the meantime, however, I'll share some of the aggregated performance for 2022. Our most critical area for improvement is on safety and health. Over the course of the last 18 months, we have unfortunately recorded 8 fatalities. This is an unacceptable figure and one that has stopped to reset in our health and safety approach. Conversely, we did see improvement in our lost time and total recordable injury frequency rates. But without everyone going home to their families each day, this progress means little. Our localization strategy, that is hiring and procuring from local communities and reducing expatriates and international procurement, continued a very pleasing trend with 96% of our employees being host country nationals. We continue to meet our environmental targets, including reusing and recycling 83% of our water use, up from 80% in 2021, and reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 6% year-on-year and 11% against our 2018 baseline. We are particularly pleased with our progress towards conformance with international best practice, that being the ICMM's performance expectation and the World Gold Council's responsible gold mining principles, which we have collectively referred to as the RGMPs Plus. We have included a complete conformance disclosure in our sustainability report, along with external assurance against our conformance to the respective council's mining principles. In addition, our progress against the Global Industry Standard on Teams Management, or GISTM, has been pleasing, and we will share some more information on the GISTM later in this presentation as we approach the committed disclosure date of the 5th of August. These are just some of the metrics we measure. And as I said, we will take a deeper dive into them during this presentation, showing our sustainability strategy is implemented on the ground at a site level where it makes the most difference. I will now hand over to Detlev Van Der Veen, who will take you through the safety performance and our road map to zero. As part of our safety reset, Detlev has been appointed as the Global Head of Health and Safety. Over to you, Detlev.

Thanks, Grant, and good day. Health and safety is the foundational value of our business, and our safety vision is every person going home safe and healthy every day. As noted earlier, we made good progress in reducing our total recordable injuries and our lost time injuries by 11% and 42%, respectively. While this progress is pleasing, it was undone at the top end and most fundamental level. Five of our colleagues losing their lives in workplace incidents during the year is simply unacceptable. And we've had a number of honest conversations and engaged in a lot of reflection to identify and understand what is going wrong and what we must do to keep our people safe. Full and thorough investigations were undertaken for each loss of life, and the results have been discussed at all levels of the organization. This has accumulated in the revision and a reset of our safety program, Journey to Zero. Our Journey to Zero road map, which is summarized and shown here, was developed earlier this year by members of our regional safety teams, selected executives and senior members from across the business. We call this our Journey to Zero because zero harm will start with zero fatalities. The road map identifies five progressive milestones. These are: honest reflection; connection; engagement; ownership; and one team, one mission. Alongside this, there are four focal areas for action and these are: risk management, courageous leadership development, contractor management, and monitoring and assurance. We are tracking our progress against the Journey to Zero rollout, including company-wide communications to the frontline shift workers. I'll hand it back to Grant to take you through our engagement and investment with our communities.

At Barrick, we understand and recognize that the countries and communities we operate in are our hosts, our neighbors and our partners. Linking back to our sustainable development goals slide, we believe the mining industry is a catalyst for socioeconomic development through the infrastructure we build, the jobs we create, the businesses we support through our supply chains and the strategic investments we make in local communities. For us, this is an imperative and a responsibility of any modern mining company. Fundamental to our approach is to engage openly, honestly and with mutual respect, and importantly, to take time to listen. We apply this across and throughout our business. But with our communities, it is really epitomized by our community development committees, or CDCs, which we put community members at the heart of discussions and decision-making regarding the support we provide. While we know money spent does not always equate to impact, it is an important means for showcasing the scale of the impact we can and do have. In 2022, we distributed more than $15 billion in economic value, almost $11 billion of which stayed in our host countries. $6 billion was spent with in-country suppliers. Almost $3 billion went to governments through taxes and royalties, and nearly $2 billion was paid to employees. A further $36 million was invested into community development initiatives distributed and managed by the community development committees I mentioned earlier. For example, through Nevada Gold Mines, we have invested $3 million in the development of two new early learning centers in Spring Creek and Alka. The centers opened in May of 2022 and provide preschool care and learning facilities for local children. We have extended the hours for each facility to run from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. to reflect the typical work schedules of our employees, helping to support those workers with late or early shifts by providing much-needed childcare. Or like the investment we have made into the Astros Baseball program in the Dominican Republic at our Pueblo Viejo mine. Through this program, we have committed $400,000 to rehabilitate three local fields for young people to play and train on, giving them an alternative to a life of crime and opening doors for gifted players. One of the difficulties with sustainability reporting for a global company like Barrick is that aggregated data does not give stakeholders an understanding of what it really means in the places we operate, what it is like on the ground. This year, we are trying to capture country-focused pages throughout the report that provide asset-specific performance data and also focus on a theme that is particularly pertinent for that operation. Our operations in Tanzania is one such example where the international narrative is not reflective of the truly remarkable change and success we have had on the ground. As you all know, we took operational control of North Mara, Bulyanhulu and Buzwagi in September of 2019. At the time, North Mara was effectively closed, and the relationships with the communities had eroded to a level where there was no social license to operate. But resetting those relationships, rebuilding trust, ensuring the safety of the North Mara tailing storage facility and becoming part of the local community were our immediate priorities. It has taken time and energy across the mine and the organization, but it is now paying off. Last year, we delivered almost $1 billion in economic value in Tanzania. And we employed 2,500 people, again, with the bulk being Tanzanians. And importantly, nearly half of all new hires were from the communities local to our operations. Our $12 million investment in community development since 2019 has been transformative for our communities. One of our key projects recently completed is the construction of a water tower that provides potable water to nearly 35,000 people in the communities around North Mara. But our commitment goes further than just the community around our mines. And we also committed $30 million into education across the whole of Tanzania. This investment will go towards building more than 1,000 classrooms and over 1,600 ablution facilities at schools. A critical part of our stakeholder and community engagement is ensuring that we have robust grievance mechanisms in place that are used and trusted and that are able to settle grievances in good time. Each of our operations has a functioning grievance mechanism, which aligns with the IFC performance standards and the United Nations guiding principles. The bulk of our grievances received last year were linked to land and resettlement processes by geography, arose from Kibali in the DRC and Pueblo Viejo in the Dominican Republic. At both these operations, we are either planning for resettlement or actively undertaking resettlement. It is encouraging, however, that the mechanism is being used, and importantly, resolving these grievances lodged. One performance metric used to measure the effectiveness of our grievance mechanism is to determine the proportion of grievances resolved and the time taken to resolve them. Our group-wide target is to resolve grievances within 30 days. However, we do not compromise process to meet this objective. The process must be followed, communicated clearly and escalated and investigated where necessary. During 2022, 64% of grievances were resolved within the 30-day target, and we look to improve on this metric in future. We also have an anonymous whistleblower hotline that is available 24 hours a day in all languages of our operating countries. Moving now to human rights. Respecting human rights is foundational for us. It is one of the key pillars of our overall sustainability vision. We have zero tolerance for any human rights violations committed by our employees, affiliates, all the third parties acting on our behalf. We have a stand-alone human rights policy, which is informed by the United Nations global principles, protect, respect and remedy framework, with the voluntary principles on security and human rights and the OECD guidelines for multinationals. These principles are also embedded throughout our policies and guidelines, including our code of business, conduct and ethics, our anti-bribery and corruption and social performance policies, as well as our supplier code of ethics. Our policy is then applied through our human rights compliance program, and we conduct both self-assessments at all sites annually and independent human rights assessments undertaken on a prioritized risk basis. In 2022, independent assessments were undertaken at Tongon, Lumwana and Veladero. External training was also provided to security staff at these operations, along with our standard practice, are providing training on a scheduled frequency at all of our operations. Independent assessments during 2023 include North Mara, Bulyanhulu, Jabal Sayid, Kibali and Loulo. An effective sustainability strategy includes transparency and taking responsibility for past and present issues. This is embodied by our determination to resolve legacy sustainability issues at both our operational and close mines. These were inherited from legacy Barrick following the merger with Randgold. However, the new management has been working hard to resolve these. I would now like to take you through some of the legacy issues and some of the allegations that are referenced in external reports with the hope that this will provide you with more detail and valuable context. I will start with North Mara. And as I'm sure you are all aware, there are legacy human rights allegations pertaining to the mine. Rather than going to the full detail, we have summarized the salient points here, and I'll provide an update on the progress to resolution as well as our overall approach. Between 2013 and 2019, 14 claimants lodged legal proceedings against North Mara and Barrick, citing excessive use of force by the Tanzanian police. While the jurisdiction for these cases is Tanzania, we have agreed to have them heard in the English courts. The hearings are scheduled for June 2024. Further to the U.K. claims, 21 claimants have launched legal proceedings in Ontario, Canada. The allegations involve the Tanzanian police force and the alleged actions after 2019. There's been limited communication with Barrick regarding these proceedings, nor were we afforded the opportunity to comment prior to them being lodged. The allegations have all been raised by Raid, a U.K.-based NGO. Going back to 2019, Raid submitted a complaint to the London Bullion Market Association, or LBMA, for the continued certification of the refiner, MMTC-PAMP, that traded with North Mara. The complaints by Raid triggered an incident review process by the LBMA, and MMTC-PAMP appointed Synergy, an independent global consultant, to complete an assessment of North Mara based on the LBMA's responsible gold guidance and OECD due diligence process. This multiyear incident grow process, consisting of two on-site assessments by Synergy, concluded in 2022 with the LBMA closing the incident review process based on key findings from their assessments. They recognized the measurable improvement in the management of risks since Barrick had taken control of North Mara, and they found no reason as to why the refinery should hold trade with North Mara. After numerous engagements and invitations to visit North Mara, Raid finally accepted and visited the mine in January this year. It was an opportunity for us to not only share with them our approach but to provide them with the context in which we operate, something that we're not familiar with, as they are based in the U.K. and have not been to the mine. They visited community development projects, showing how we have worked to rebuild our social license, and we arranged meetings with the communities in which they participated. Most notably, these included meetings with community leaders, the district commissioner and the regional police commissioner. Although no information or evidence to back up their allegations was shared with us by Raid, it was a good opportunity to invite them to raise their concerns and allegations with those responsible authorities. During these tripartite meetings, none of the allegations made by Raid were corroborated by the community leaders. In addition, the authorities asked that Raid submit the evidence to them, including the Tanzanian Human Rights Commission. To date, Raid has not provided any further information or evidence. We have taken many actions to update and improve our approach to human rights, particularly at North Mara. And as you know, our approach to community development focuses on using local companies wherever possible. This helps us inject money into the community, building businesses and community resilience. We have also applied this thinking to security at North Mara, and we replaced the international private security company and appointed a local security company that both aligns with our localization philosophy as well as helping with community engagement as [indiscernible] the security, understand the local culture and the communication is easier. Beyond the Synergy reports as part of the LBMA review process, we also undertook independent human rights assessments in terms of our human rights policy. These assessments track progress over the year, identify new focal areas, and maintain an evolving action plan and recommendations towards constant improvement. In terms of the Tanzanian police force, they are naturally under their own chain of command, like you would expect of any police force, and they've not directed our security. And similarly, we do not direct them. We do, however, provide human rights and voluntary principles trailing to the Tanzania lease, as we do with our private security. We also have signed an MOU with the Tanzanian police, which sets out the agreements for training, the standards they must adhere to and a clear incident escalation process and investigation requirements. Another of our operations which has legacy human rights allegations is Porgera in Papua New Guinea. These concerns were dealt with at the time through the creation of the Porgera Remedy Framework. However, allegations were raised subsequent to this process concluding. However, these are unsubstantiated and have not been raised directly with us by the individuals but rather by so-called representative groups. We have asked for the information but has not been forthcoming. Porgera remains in care and maintenance, but we have begun preparations internally to plan for a restart. Upon reopening of the mine, our priority actions include supporting individuals and gaining access to the grievance mechanism and reviewing and closing legacy grievances. We will also undertake an independent human rights assessment and continue to train the public and private security forces on human rights and the voluntary principles. Shifting now to the environmental aspects at Porgera. Riverine tailings is by no means our favorite method of -- for disposing off tails. However, it is the most suitable option in a region that has high rainfall, frequent earthquakes and landslides. We are, however, committed to further reducing the amount of tailings deposited in the river. And as you can see here, we have a road map towards complete reduction of riverine disposal. Once we open, we will try a co-mingled facility, starting with the oxide tails material and subject to success, continue to plan to expand the facility. In addition, we have an extensive monitoring network to assess and understand the impacts of riverine disposal on local rivers. Our monitoring network extends up to 600 kilometers downstream and has consistently shown that water quality remains within compliance. These monitoring programs and results are reviewed and validated by an independent third party, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. Since early 2020 and in 2021, we undertook a study to understand the state of the river while operations had ceased. The study also vetted by the CSIRO found that we remain compliant and that the risks to water, sediment and human health are low at all our monitoring sites. We trust this insight to our controversies has provided valuable information and important context. We have long questioned how controversies are determined and rated by third-party raters. However, we have seen significant change in this regard based on our efforts. For example, MSCI have recognized this progress and have upgraded or removed a number of controversies since 2019. Moving on from the legacy allegations. Diversity and inclusion continues to be a key priority for Barrick. Our approach to appointment is merits-based. However, we recognize the value of a diverse workforce for our business and aim to have teams that are reflective of the communities in which we operate. As can be seen here, the ethnic diversity of our workforce is clearly representative of the areas we work in. At a group level, 12% of our workforce are women, and we have a good and growing pipeline at the organization with 18% of our management positions now filled by women and 16% of senior management are women. One operation where we are particularly proud of our diversity performance is Pueblo Viejo in the Dominican Republic. We set a target of 50% of all new hires to be women. This target was achieved during 2022, and now almost 23% of Pueblo Viejo's employees are women. I'll now hand over to Duncan, who will take us through the progress we have made in regard to the environment.

Yes. Thanks, Grant. Our approach to environmental management is holistic and integrated and one that considers people and the community because we know the environment, human health and community prosperity are linked. Some fundamental principles of this approach recognize that access to clean water is a fundamental human right. Our environmental approach must consider the community and build resilience, and communities in the areas we operate depend on functioning ecosystems and healthy biodiversity. These benefit our beliefs and principles, underpin our environmental management approach and are integrated into our decisions, actions and targets. Tailings management and dam safety is something we prioritize long before the tragic events at Brumadinho. We have a tailings management policy and standard, and we disclose our tailings storage facilities, or TSFs, by location, construction type and consequence classification as part of our tailings inventory. Of the 60 TSFs that we manage, 18 are operational and 42 are closed. All of these facilities meet regulatory requirements, and we continue to work to best practice. We were actively involved in the development of the GISTM and are working on its implementation. We are on track to disclose our conformance for priority facilities by the end of next week, all of which will be available on our website. In terms of greenhouse gases, we have an ambitious emission reduction target in place with the ultimate goal of net zero by 2050 and interim targets to track and support this progress. More than this, we have an actionable road map of initiatives at every site and committed capital that drive emissions reductions that also pass our internal investment hurdles. Last year, we again reduced our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 6% year-on-year and an 11% reduction against our 2018 baseline. We will continue to show our progress against our GHG road map and keep it updated as new emission reduction opportunities arise. In the past year, we broke ground with the development of the 200-megawatt solar plant at the TS power plant in Nevada, as well as tripling of our solar capacity to 60 megawatts at Loulo and Mali. We also continue to execute power purchase agreements in Nevada that source electricity from our own power-generating facilities as well as increasing our use of electricity from renewable sources. We know that simply disclosing our progress to reduce emissions is not enough, and that a change in climate and extreme weather events requires us to understand the risks posed to our business. In line with the requirements of the TCFD, we have been undertaking climate scenario analysis and associated risk assessments for our sites, starting with our Tier 1 gold assets. Last year, we completed these for Kibali, Loulo and Carlin for both transition and physical risks and expanded for the whole MGM complex for transition risks. Our scenario analysis for these mines considered the predominant climate scenarios from a 1.5-degree Celsius world through to our current emission projections. The key conclusions from the physical risk assessment are that our assets are considered resilient, and our facility designs are expected to be adequate for future temperature and rainfall scenarios. We also continue to progress the data maturity and emissions-based engagement in our value chain as part of Scope 3 emissions. The objectives of Scope 3 is to drive collective global climate action. So although the measurement and reporting of these emissions are demonstrated here, our main focus is the outcome of this process: that is the process allows us to identify emission hotspots in our value chain and set both engagement and awareness plans, and then work with those suppliers to measure their emissions and establish their own reporting and target setting. We are engaging with our highest-impact suppliers to understand their reporting maturity and their efforts to reduce emissions. This will be a feedback-driven process that we will continue to build upon year-on-year. We are busy developing our Scope 3 target setting and are on course to disclose this before the end of this year. What is the key input for mining? And as we noted at start of this section, clean water is also a fundamental human right. However, access to water is at the nexus of growing global populations and the changing climate, resulting in water scarcity becoming a growing concern. We have a stand-alone water policy, and our approach to water management focuses on conserving and protecting high-quality water sources, access for other users in the watershed, reusing and recycling water wherever practical, and safe discharge. We have developed site-wide water balances and tailored water management plans for each site that consider climate, water sources and the community. Last year, 83% of our water was reused or recycled, increasing to 86% in areas of water scarcity. Following on from the last slide, we wanted to share a snapshot of our water reuse percentages at an asset level as well as an overview of our main water sources and combined if they are under water stress. We have adapted our definition of water stress, which considers not just scarcity but also abundance as too much water composed in environmental and operational risk. For us, some of our operations such as Pueblo Viejo, Kibali, and Porgera are on areas of high rainfall. And our focus here is to ensure we manage this excess water well and prevent contact with operational areas. Some key water management performance to note include 88% of water reused at the water stress MGM complex and as much as 97% of water reuse at Veladero in Argentina, which operates a heap leach system. Our Veladero mine in Argentina is one of our most unique assets. It's located in the high Andes at around 4,500 meters above sea level. There are no doorstep communities at Veladero, and set up communities are more than 100 kilometers away from the mine. Nonetheless, we have significant programs focused on local employment, local procurement and community development. The area has limited access to municipal water supply. And one of the focuses of our community work has been to construct new and rehabilitate existing local water treatment plants and agricultural irrigation projects to ensure communities have both access to water and to better quality water. The treatment plants are particularly important in this region, which has naturally poor water quality. This poor water quality is a perception that some anti-mining groups like to use to suggest that the mine is operating irresponsibly. Going back to 2015, we had an unfortunate spill at Veladero, where cyanide-bearing process solution was spilled onto a road next to the Valley Leach Facility, or VLF, and a portion of that solution entered the near waterway. We immediately reported the incident to authorities, and environmental monitoring was conducted. Monitoring at the time confirmed that the incident had no impact on local water sources or access to water for local communities. Further to our own monitoring, the Sanpan government commissioned an impact assessment undertaken by the United Nations Office for Project Services and the United Nations Environment program. The UN assessments both concluded that the incident did not cause any impact to downstream areas and pose no human health risks. This report is available publicly. Over the past 18 months, allegations of repeated spills have been made publicly, and an official complaint was submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. These allegations have all come from the same organization. To be clear, these are all entirely false. I'll remind you that we reuse 97% of water and that our communities are some 100 kilometers away from the mine. We have an extensive water monitoring network and collect over 500 water samples from 122 different locations every month, all of which is tested and analyzed at an independent laboratory. We also undertake community participatory monitoring to show transparency through the process, and we make all of these monitoring results available to the authorities and the public. Nonetheless, these allegations continue to be misconstrued in public and are the subject of discussion with ESG rating agencies and impact our ESG scores despite this overwhelming evidence to the contrary and many reputable in-country journalists reporting that the allegations are indeed unfounded. We have also provided an in-depth response to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, which is also publicly available, and we will continue to engage with them. A big focus of our environmental work is nature, and starting with biodiversity. Functioning ecosystems and a healthy biodiversity underpins all life on Earth. This is an aspect which is being increasingly recognized by industry, governments and investors. However, for us and in our communities, that has long been a priority. Our overarching ambition is to make a positive contribution to nature, starting with no net loss to biodiversity. We do this by rehabilitating sites through both concurrent rehabilitation and agreed closure plans, undertaking -- understanding our impacts to key biodiversity features, and expected residual impacts. To achieve our target of no net loss and address our expected residual impacts, we identify measurable conservation actions, such as through partnerships with organizations like African parks, and our efforts to protect the regionally important state graphs and the habitat here in Nevada. This year, we have set ourselves a further challenge. While everyone is speaking about the importance of biodiversity in nature, little progress has been made in defining how best to measure and report on these aspects. We are working with external experts to develop a tool to calculate and measure our contribution to nature and conservation. We hope in time to share this tool and efforts with wider industry that will move the needle for everyone. With that, I'll hand back to Mark to talk through our biodiversity project that has been 13 years in the making.

Thanks, Duncan, and I hope everyone has enjoyed the presentation and found it insightful. And so we wanted to just share with you a very interesting project, as Duncan refers, and that is on the back of our long partnership with African Parks and in particular the focus of the Garamba National Park in the DRC, which is a world heritage site and one of Africa's oldest parks, we have sponsored a number of initiatives to reestablish that very special park of DRC and a piece of wilderness that is being preserved right from the very beginning. It's a home to a range of important species, including elephants, the critically endangered Kordofan giraffe, and it used to be the home to the northern white rhino. We are delighted to announce that after over a decade of identifying this dream once just after we had purchased the Kibali gold mine and a number of years in planning, in June of this year, we were located the first 16 white rhino back into the Garamba National Park. The rhino introduction serves many biodiversity benefits from, of course, protecting an important species and creating another gene pool to the ecosystem services that these big herbivores play in the grazing areas that are beneficial for other biodiversity and also reducing virus. But this is not only important from a biodiversity perspective. It is also an evidence of the improved security in this region, and the part that Kibali has played in bringing stability to the northeastern DRC. Only a short decade ago, such a project was considered a nonstarter. And so I hope that we have made clear our holistic approach to sustainability is entrenched throughout the Barrick organization. And as we've demonstrated today, our bottom-up leadership and approach to sustainability, we feel, is paying dividends as seen through the performance metrics and trends. However, one thing I want to assure you is we won't rest on our past performance. We challenge ourselves every day for continuous improvement. Based on our annual materiality assessment, we also wanted to talk through a few of our focus areas for the year ahead. Firstly, using our purchasing power to drive our Scope 3 emissions down, as mentioned earlier, we are working with our suppliers to improve data sets Scope 3 targets and track progress to achieve this. Secondly, meeting our commitments under the GISTM, disclosing our conformance and continuing our safe tailings management. In addition, we will work to develop a tool to measure nature and our commitment to conserve key biodiversity features as we've demonstrated at Garamba. We will also continue to engage with the ESG raters to understand the scores whilst ensuring the most up-to-date information is available for those scorers so that they can reach informed conclusions relating to enhance on controversies, such as what Duncan explained at Veladero. And finally, progressing the environmental and social studies at Reko Diq while at the same time building on the license to operate, which we have already begun to establish by forming CDCs and delivering our community development commitments. And I need to dwell on that a little bit and that is I've personally been to most of the town halls in the different villages around the Reko Diq site. And when we started this, I think Grant actually had an engagement where one of the local leadership explained to him that he wasn't going to tell the community what to do. And that's the very base of our CDCs is we do not tell the community what to do. We engage with them, we have a conversation, we work on ensuring that they come up with things they think are most important within the five pillars of our commitment to community investment. And it was extremely pleasing to me when we opened the first two schools in that region. And we were able to witness that close to 50% of those children were girls and the other 50%, of course, are boys. And it's -- when your perception of that part of the world is that girls and women are not important, but that's not true. And so discovering other cultures and embracing their values and their visions and their foundational views of how they want to live in their family structures is important. And sometimes, we in the West don't spend enough time understanding it. And our CDCs, whether it's in the DRC or Balochistan or [indiscernible] in Nevada, they embrace the local community values and aspirations and work as partners and investors, co-investors in those communities' ambitions. So with that, I would like to conclude by just going back to my opening message, and that is we know that done right, the mining sector is a powerful catalyst in the struggle for social and economic development quickly and directly supporting entrepreneurs and communities and bringing stakeholders together for collective action. At Barrick, our sustainability strategy and approach is enabling us to realize these opportunities and ensure sustainable delivery. And so with that, that ends the formal presentation. As the part of this engagement today, and we'll now open it up for questions and discussions. Thank you very much for listening.

Thank you, Mark. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. We have a question from [Sunil] [indiscernible].

Talk through the sustainability report. I'm looking forward to reading the full report and learning more about how we operate and just educating myself. So I have a quick question on something that was touched upon very lightly. One of the speakers mentioned that we had here to things like voluntary principles and then -- in our operations and all the rest of that. I just have a question basically because we work in areas that are very underdeveloped. I mean Reko Diq, and that's a case in point and places like in Africa and where people have to learn and we have to adapt and understands local culture. So is there a progression that you make towards these things? And is it reflected in reports from point zero to you can't suddenly get to point 100, right? So I'm just curious to know how that's reflected.

So I'll probably answer that, Sunil. As you know, I've been in this game for 40-odd years. And when we started out and built Randgold Resources back in the early '90s, the mining industry had no concept of what ESG stood for. And we focused on developing and building Randgold Resources from scratch. We didn't have an employee, we didn't have any money. We went out and raised a bit of seed capital and then set out to build a profitable gold mining business on the back of a period in the global gold industry that hadn't produced much badly for some time. And so it was a novel idea. And again, we focused in on Franco-phone Africa because the geology doesn't stop at political boundaries. And we felt and I had identified that the francophone countries in Africa had been neglected by largely Anglophone mining industry. And so -- and again, those countries like the West African countries, Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire and then DRC, those countries have been neglected. And -- but the geology was quite exciting. And so over a period of 20 years, we made five discoveries that built what was the most profitable gold mine in that period, a gold mining company. And it was based -- it was founded on the very principles of partnership with our communities, the recognition that the mining assets in a country on national assets and we, as miners, are taking on the responsibility to develop those national assets for the benefit of all stakeholders. And in that structure, we recognize that most countries are as important as our shareholders, because the asset actually belongs to that country. And so when you intellectualize that then Cortes to recognize the key stakeholders, of course, the government that represents the people in that country and an important aspect of paying rent or taxes to the central treasury. But there's other important stakeholders like the opportunity to employ in that country and not only just for labor but that we don't -- we import expatriates to develop the skills which are always there in those countries. And of course, we embrace the concept of developing and engaging with local business people. And so therefore, you become a real corporate citizen in that country, and you create partnerships. And that's how the CDC arose that we so strongly believe in. And we partnered in all those countries. And we've shown that it doesn't only work in emerging or underdeveloped countries, as you suggest. But it works equally here in the United States at Nevada. And we've shown that it works in South America, of course, the Pacific Rim, which is that some of the more challenging environments like Papua New Guinea. And again, our scorecard that Grant spoke about is that measure, and we've always done it. And if you go back in the history, you'll be able to track our progress. But as I said and Grant reiterated is that we do not spend a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror. It's nice to reflect on how we've progressed every year when we make these presentations and talk to our various stakeholders that are integral in our sustainability discussions and philosophy. And at the same time, our history is a learning platform, and our future is how we can improve. And so I think that's as best as I can do for quite a complicated question. I will -- before passing on to back to Lois for the next question, just ask Grant if he's got anything to add.

Yes. Thanks, [Sunil]. Thanks for the question. I think in terms of what you mentioned around the progression when we -- particularly when we go into new projects like Reko Diq, and you mentioned the voluntary principles as well as the United Nation's guiding principles, and I think it's important for us to set that standard. And that's why we have the policies in place, obviously, starting with our human rights policy that refers to the voluntary principles on security and human rights but also the UN GPs, but then also the standard in which we do that. So when we go into a new country, that is the standard that we set and obviously demand that of our contractors and any business associates that we have. But it is important that we take them through the process. And that's why we conduct independent human rights assessments. And they're not just to monitor our progress but also that of our contractors and affiliates, but also to help the training. And I think that's probably the most important aspect of implementing and getting it to that place that you refer to in terms of 100%. We do need to have that training. And that's why it's so important for us to engage with local NGOs on the ground, much like we've done at North Mara. Because they understand the operating context, they understand the people, the communities as opposed to perhaps some of the international NGOs that have never been to the operation. So we partner with these local NGOs to help us with the training. They engage with the local communities, importantly in the local languages. And also, it builds that trust, trust for the communities to start asking us questions on what some of these policies mean, how do we implement them. And if they feel that we're not aligning to them, how do they raise grievances. So it is a process, as you mentioned. But I think importantly, we need to start off with showing what our standards are and communicating that broadly right from the get-go.

I'm excited to watch this and be a part of it growing at Reko Diq.

You've answered part of the following question, but we do have a question from [indiscernible], Zurich. Could you talk more about Reko Diq project in Pakistan? And how do you envision to go beyond in terms of sustainability in the region and for the project?

So I think we have gone a long way to answer this in the previous -- with the previous question. I think what I'll do is let's hand it around because I think we -- there's a lot of expertise here. And I'll wrap up where you finish. So Grant, you can have the first bracket until the possible [indiscernible].

Yes. Perfect. Thanks, Mark. And yes, as Mark said, we've all been on the ground, had these town halls with the communities, but importantly, spent time on the ground, looking at the whole spectrum of what sustainability means and as we mentioned, how it all fits together. A good example of that is in the communities and particularly in that part of Pakistan and Balochistan is the fact that water is a precious resource. And we saw that the provision of water was obviously very important to the communities. And that's one of our first priorities of how we could help the communities access clean drinking water, which had numerous benefits, not to mention health benefits because the water that they were currently consuming was very saline. So that's an important aspect. Obviously, in terms of the work that we're doing from a feasibility perspective, we need and we do follow the performance standards as per IFC and have conducted and already started conducting a lot of the specialist studies, from water to air quality to biodiversity. So that is obviously a fundamental step in us getting a project up and running. But I think more importantly and as we alluded to in the presentation, it was really starting to engage with the local communities and building that social license to operate. I mean, as I've said many times before, is you can have an environmental license. But if you don't have that social license, you will never operate successfully. And we've started that, and we've been very encouraged with the progress that we've made in terms of the community development committees that we've set up. So we have a local CDC for some of the communities that are closest to our mines. And then we have another CDC that is looking a little more regionally in the town of Nakundi. And we've already seen, as I said, very encouraging results. Mark alluded to the schools that we've opened, and we've also engaged with a health provider to start working on bringing or getting access to healthcare for those communities. But I'll perhaps pause there and just hand over to Duncan in terms of some of the work we're doing, again, to build our sustainability strategy at Reko Diq.

Yes, good. I think majority has been covered. This is obviously an area that has really been long forgotten from a development perspective. And there were some external concerns also as we implement our sustainability strategy and particularly our community development approach with that, again, translates into another culture region where it hasn't been implemented before. And I think that process has been smoother than any of us have really expected it to be going into it. We always expect some challenges along the way, but I think the way the community has seen how we trust and empower and put the decision making into their own hands through that CDC model and bringing all these different groups together and having honest engagement that everyone comes to the party has really been a key kind of contributing factor to really getting things going and building that foundational trust for us to go on. From there, we're obviously early into the work. So we're setting up a lot of baseline in understanding where a lot of focus and development needs to go. But certainly, we've been met with a lot of positivity and enthusiasm and encouragement for the project to go ahead, and hopefully, further development and running through those CDCs.