World Water Week (25 – 29 August) started life as part of a public water festival in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1991 and is now considered the world’s leading conference on global water issues. This year’s theme centres on water cooperation, for peace and security in its broadest sense.
This theme resonates with Anglo American – 83% of our operating sites are in water-scarce or water-stressed regions, so how we work with our communities and other stakeholders for shared water challenges really matters. We achieve this through our approach to water stewardship.
Water stewardship – the use of water in ways that are socially equitable, environmentally sustainable, and economically beneficial, achieved through a stakeholder-inclusive process – is one of the four strategic pillars of our water management policy. The others are achieving regional water and operational water security (resiliency and efficiency), and ensuring operational excellence.
Industry commitment
As a member of the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), Anglo American has pledged to support the responsible use of water through the body’s Water Stewardship Position Statement, published in 2017.
Since then, in 2021, the ICMM published the updated Water Reporting: Good Practice Guide – a foundation for simple and transparent reporting on water performance – as well as a Water Stewardship Maturity Framework (2023), designed to help the industry advance water stewardship performance.
This year, the ICMM is partnering with The International Network for Acid Prevention (INAP) to help mining companies prevent and reduce water pollution caused by acid rock drainage and metal leaching from mines. The collaboration will focus on developing a new resource to support the implementation of INAP’s Global Acid Rock Drainage (GARD) Guide in mining and metals operations. This approach is already recognised in our Water Management Standard.
Water stewardship projects
As well as collaborating with the industry body and our peers, we work with our communities, local agencies, and governments on a wide range of water-related projects:
In South Africa, our Venetia diamond mine is a member of the Limpopo water catchment management forum. The forum collaborates with the State Department of Water and Sanitation, local government, and other key stakeholders, to support municipalities and communities.
Since 2021, Venetia has supported more than 85,000 people through water infrastructure and supply projects, such as the installation of water storage tanks and pumps to extend the water supply to all the villages in one municipal area.
To reduce our reliance on fresh water in Chile, where people have lived with drought for more than 10 years, we’re working on our integrated water security project (IWSP). A desalination plant will supply desalinated water to our Los Bronces’ Las Tórtolas copper operation from 2026. This will supply more than 45% of Los Bronces’ needs and will provide clean water to about 20,000 people in neighbouring communities.
Potential for further cooperation
Cooperation can deliver significant benefits, but there is potential to create even greater impact by building relationships with stakeholders beyond the mining industry, says Dr Henrietta Salter, our Water Stewardship Principal.
“We're very good at our core work as water stewards, which is managing water within our operations,” she says. “But, taking a step back and looking at a catchment level, we also need to understand the broader water risks and opportunities around our operations”.
“A stakeholder-inclusive approach is about engaging with all the actors in the catchment to learn from each other, benefit from each other’s expertise and work together to build trust and support our communities and the environment.
“For example, we can learn from the approach of companies such as those in the food and beverage sector, whose main content is water. They've been very innovative at engaging all the way up and down their supply chains and that’s something that we in the mining industry could definitely look at – we could make a much greater impact through collective action.
“We recognise that water stewardship is not an endpoint, a goal to achieve or a tick box - it is a journey.”
