Material Issues
In order to ensure a balanced and reasonable presentation of our responsible mining performance, we must first determine what to cover in this report. A company of Barrick’s size is faced with myriad social, environmental, and economic issues on which to report each year. To help identify the most salient issues on which to focus our annual Responsibility Report, we conduct the following three-step materiality process:
- Issues identification. Issues are identified through both internal and external sources. Internally, issues are identified via Barrick’s risk register, which is updated through a company-wide risk assessment process on a quarterly and annual basis. Externally, issues are raised via community meetings, investor calls, at the Annual Shareholder’s Meeting, during the third-party assurance process, and other forums. In addition, we review the Global Reporting Initiative’s list of topics and related indicators, monitor issues raised in the media, as well as review more general industry and societal trends that could impact our operations.
- Prioritization. The next step is to rate the significance of each issue both in terms of its importance to our stakeholders and the potential impact the issue can have on our business. Through this process we categorize issues as low, medium, or high importance. In 2011, this prioritization process was complemented by an external survey of over 600 NGO, academic, government, and industry stakeholders across 10 countries, conducted by a third-party consultant. This survey asked stakeholders to assess both the importance of several issues facing Barrick, as well as their perceptions of how we are managing these issues.
- Review & reporting. Working with functional leads across the business, our third step is to review and finalize the issues that will ultimately be reported on in the annual Responsibility Report. Over the course of developing the report, these issues are refined and grouped into common themes, which are summarized below.
Those issues that are highly important to stakeholders and have the potential to significantly impact our business are included in this report. We do not publicly report on all topics, but omission from our report does not mean that an issue is not managed by Barrick.
