Land Stewardship
Land stewardship addresses how to maximise efficient land use for competing stakeholders while minimising degradation of natural capital and ecosystem services. Our integrated land stewardship strategy aligns operational needs with environmental and social goals. It informs decisions across the asset life cycle, planning, operations, growth, closure and beyond, while ensuring land is managed to support biodiversity, water resilience and community priorities. We also use advanced geospatial analysis tools to evaluate land assets, assess current conditions and identify risks and opportunities.
Rehabilitation
We define rehabilitation as restoring disturbed land to conditions aligned with identified post‑mining land uses, prioritising safety, geotechnical stability, non‑polluting outcomes and ecological function. We focus on progressive rehabilitation, doing it during operations wherever feasible, to reduce closure liabilities and bring forward environmental and social value. As required in our Mine Closure Standard and Mine Closure Toolbox, our regenerative approach to mine closure and rehabilitation allows us to find opportunities through designing for closure, embracing nature-based solutions (i.e. passive wetland treatment and geomorphic designs), circularity and local economic diversification and, in doing so, reduces liabilities and the dependency created by mining.
Rehabilitation is one of the most direct ways to improve our NPI trajectory.* Our Group rehabilitation strategy, which outlines the requirements for our operations to integrate rehabilitation into their planning processes, including Resource Development Plans and Life of Asset Plans, is integral to improving site rehabilitation outcomes across the portfolio.
By progressively restoring disturbed land we restore habitat condition and ecological function. Rehabilitation activities improve vegetation cover, structure, and native species diversity, which are key QHH attributes. As soils stabilise and fertility recovers, native vegetation establishes and matures, enabling fauna return and the gradual recovery of ecological processes such as pollination, nutrient cycling, and water regulation. These improvements shift areas from low-condition habitat towards functioning ecosystems, increasing both the quality and extent of habitat captured in the QHH calculation. At sites, we also incorporate climate-resilient species, native seed propagation, or targeted habitat enhancements to optimise restoration performance. This enables our rehabilitation efforts to move beyond compliance towards measurable ecological gains, directly reflected in rising QHH scores and contributing to our longer-term Net Positive Impact ambition.
* A Net Positive Impact trajectory means following a clear, credible pathway where, over time, an organisation’s actions result in more positive outcomes for biodiversity and nature than negative.
