RMI Report 2020 – ESG best practice

The RMI Report 2020 is an evidence-based assessment of 38 large-scale mining companies’ policies and practices on economic, environmental, social and governance issues.

The report is produced by the Responsible Mining Foundation (RMF), an independent research organisation that encourages continuous improvement in responsible mining across the industry by developing tools and frameworks, sharing public-interest data and enabling informed and constructive engagement between mining companies and other stakeholders.

The RMI assessment covers 43 topics, grouped into the previously mentioned thematic areas. The assessment focuses largely on company-wide policies and practices on economic, environmental, social and governance (EESG) issues, using three types of indicators (or ‘measurement areas’):

• Commitment indicators assess the extent to which companies have produced formalised commitments, endorsed by senior management, and assigned responsibilities and resources to implement these policies.
• Action indicators assess the extent to which companies are systematically putting in place measures to improve and maximise the potential EESG benefits and avoid, minimise or mitigate the negative EESG impacts of their activities.
• Effectiveness indicators assess the extent to which companies are tracking, reviewing and acting to improve their performance on managing EESG issues.

In addition, the RMI assessment also includes a smaller set of mine-site indicators to assess mine-site-level actions on the following topics: local employment, local procurement, post-closure viability of communities, community grievances, worker grievances, air quality, water quality, water quantity, tailings management, and emergency preparedness.

The full results and individual company and mine-site reports are available at www.responsibleminingindex.org, in Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.