Our performance

Every year, we report on our sustainable development performance through a number of channels. In addition to the summary of our performance and sustainable development highlights in our Annual report, we publish sustainable development programme information, progress against our goals and targets and performance data on these web pages and we also report under other voluntary commitments.

These voluntary commitments include:

• Global Reporting Initiative
• United Nations Global Compact
• Carbon Disclosure Project
• Business in the Community Corporate Responsibility Index 
• Dow Jones Sustainability Index 
• FTSE4Good

Reporting at a Group level

Rio Tinto’s sustainable development data are reported for calendar years and, unless otherwise stated, represent 100 per cent of the parameter at each managed operation, even though Rio Tinto may have only partial ownership.

Rio Tinto reports in line with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) G3 guidelines. Accordingly, we use a materiality assessment to help us focus this report on those issues that are most important to our internal and external stakeholders. Omission from the material issues covered in our report does not mean that the issue is not managed by the company.

We collect health, safety, environment and community data using industry standard techniques consistent with Rio Tinto standards. We apply global definitions and guidance to ensure consistency and comparability between operations. We store data, which is queried and aggregated to the Group level, in a central database to avoid manual intervention

The factors and formulae that are used in our calculations are sourced from relevant industry protocols (for example, the Global Reporting Initiative, the International Organization for Standardization, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) where available.

Data reported in previous years may be modified if business or Group verification processes detect material errors, or if changes are required to historic data to ensure compatibility with current year data (eg updating emission factor assumptions). Wherever possible, data for operations acquired prior to 1 October during the reporting period are collected for inclusion in the Rio Tinto datasets. Divested operations are included in our data collection processes up until the transfer of management control.

With the exclusion of the Engineered Products and Packaging divisions, which are in the process of being divested, former Alcan operations have adopted Rio Tinto definitions and are included in the 2008 Rio Tinto dataset.

Integrated Rio Tinto and Alcan 2007 databases have been developed for greenhouse gas emissions, energy use and safety, but not for other sustainable development measures, due to significant definition and measurement differences for historic datasets.

Former Alcan operations are not included in the reporting of performance against our 2003 to 2008 health, safety and environmental targets due to the time scale associated with these targets and differences in the definition and measurement of data. We will set new improvement targets across a range of sustainable development metrics during 2009.

We used the independent professional services firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, to assure selected Group level sustainable development performance data, and a statement from PricewaterhouseCoopers is available on the Assurance page.

Each of our business units produce their own sustainable development reports, which will be available from the end of May.