Celebrating World Environment Day 2018 – our work at Der Brochen

World Environment Day began 44 years ago and has grown into a global platform for people of all walks of life to give back to the Earth. Participants are encouraged to do so on regional or national levels, alone or with a group – the only agenda for the day is to contribute in some way.

At Anglo American, we celebrate this event and its ambitions, and we already foster a strong dedication to working alongside UN efforts – we developed our recently launched Sustainability Strategy in close alignment with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

We formed this strategy across three pillars, one of which is Healthy Environment. As part of that pillar, our vision for the future is to create waterless, carbon-neutral mines and deliver positive biodiversity outcomes.

We are aiming to deliver a net positive impact – meaning that a project’s overall negative impacts on biodiversity are outweighed by conservation gains – across Anglo American through implementing mitigation hierarchy and investment in biodiversity stewardship by 2030. This dedication to biodiversity is shown in many ways – through our international partnerships with government institutions and approaches to site management across our operations.

Our sustainability work at Der Brochen

This is particularly evident through our biodiversity preservation work at our Der Brochen platinum project in the Limpopo province of South Africa.

The area around Der Brochen is the Sekhukhuneland Centre of Plant Endemism, recognised as a high-biodiversity area at risk from mining. We assessed the site of a potential tailings storage facility for its biodiversity and found that 58 woody and 18 herbaceous plant species were identified on site. Of them, nine were protected, five classified as threatened and five as endemic, meaning they are only found in that specific location.

To preserve this species and cause as little disruption as possible, we worked with local botanist and six community members to extract, store and relocate these specimens by capturing their native seeds and replanting them away from the mine site.

Over three months, we successfully relocated 1,058 of these endemic trees from the site to a storage nursery. In addition, we removed four tonnes of alien invasive plant species from the area.

We observe WED as part of our ongoing commitment to biodiversity and environmental stewardship, and the land that provides the metals and minerals on which we base our business. Through this and other environmental initiatives, we look forward to continuing to give back to the sites that provide us and our communities with so much.