Measurement And Analysis Of Biodiversity Conservation

Discuss about the Measurement and analyses of biodiversity conservation.

Sustainability reporting is a tool to aware all the companies operating their business in Australia about the nature as this will lead them to severe problems in the future in terms of uncertain government regulations and penalty. Rio Tinto has been selected for this reporting in evaluating the reporting status of an entity. Current report illustrates the current state of the sustainability along with the implications of the same on all the stakeholders.

Rio Tinto is an Australian based transnational firm deals in metals and mining which is ranked as world’s largest firm in an Australia. This enterprise is a collaboration of both the economies of Australia and British to mark their presence on the entire world. This firm comes into existence in the year 1873 in two headquarters of two different locations such as London in the United Kingdom and Melbourne in Australia (Rio Tinto, 2017). The business growth of this entity develops through various mergers and acquisition of several businesses who sell different products including iron ore, copper, coal, aluminium, uranium, and diamonds. A primary focus of this entity lies in the extraction of minerals and refining of business operation.

Rio Tinto operates their business in major parts of the world such as Australia and Canada to run their mining business operating smoothly. This firm is dual listed company listed on two stock exchanges of their headquarter countries. Rio Tinto Group is listed on London Stock exchange and Australian stock exchange to avail the higher benefits of the overall market volatility in the external world. Stock exchange components in which this group involves is FTSE 100 index under London stock exchange and S&P and ASX 200 index under Australian stock exchange. These two exchanges are to rated exchange board that helps in creating positive fluctuations in the business entity

Figure 1 Market areas

The aim of Rio Tinto is to produce minerals for increasing human progress as without this aim the business operation of the firm goes in vain. Rio Tinto group are the pioneers of mining and metal as their motive is to offer quality oriented services to all its customers. Rio Tinto has a large market as their business operates in 35 countries by covering six continents in offering a variety of services along with high quality of output. The motive of this company is to create a large number of loyal customers for the services they offer to them.

Sustainability Reporting

Figure 2 Business Cycle

This enterprise is a pioneer of not only the mines and minerals production but also introduces technological innovations in the market to get the sustainable competitive advantage as compared to their rivals. They also emphasize on protecting the atmosphere as their future programme is to reduce the carbon emissions by following eco-friendly business operations which will create balance for both presents as well as for the future generations. This company offers employee safety by adopting various safety measures as the business operations are prone to severe risks.

It is a social obligation under which an individual or group of the individual need to consider the needs of the future generations (Ceulemans, Stough and Lambrechts, 2018). Australian Council of sustainability reporting committee frames various rules and regulations to control the actions of the business in safeguarding the environment. As per the new report of the corporate sustainability reporting in Australia, various risks come in the bigger picture are economic, environmental, social and governance risks which need to be resolved at the initial stage (Talbot, D. and Boiral, 2018). All these risks play an integral role in spoiling the nature as business corporations are increasing industrial wastes, pollution, excessively using natural resources for the production of artificial and manmade resources. These practices adopted by various firms show their carefree attitude and negligence towards the environment as they are compromising with the needs of all the future generations.

Corporate sustainability reporting is governed by the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors in the year 2001 to offer strong advice in protecting the nature of all the external forces. This committee offers three-dimensional protections in resolving three kinds of issues such as environmental, social and governmental; all these issues are inter-related to each other as ignorance to one issue will lead to another problem (Lodhia, 2018). For instance, increasing global warming is an environmental issue which leads to pollution in the environment. This spreads diseases in the environment is a social issue and this issue will further lead to a governmental problem when excessive pollution becomes severe that increases deaths of humans by inhaling toxic air.

This council has 37 Australian and international business owners who collectively handle the assets worth of $1.5 trillion (Sassen and Azizi, 2018). Role of this commission is to identify the internal as well as the external impact on the business in providing various investment opportunities to maximize the overall returns. Members of this committee share their experience with each other in building a strong association which helps in resolving all the risks incurred in the external environment.

Sustainability Report of the Company

Figure 3 Trends in ASX200 reporting

The above line chart shows the status of the sustainable reporting of Australian exchange companies listed under ASX200 index. Three parameters of this line chart are no reporting, detailed reporting and moderate reporting on the y-axis and no. of companies shown on the x-axis (Corbett, Webster and Jenkin, 2018). This chart shows reporting status of companies from 2008 to 2016. Count of companies in reporting status got decreases from 31 in 2008 to 16 in 2016 shows the market awareness of the firm who shows interest towards sustainability reporting with the passage of time. Detailed reporting done by 39 number of companies in  the year 2008 and 101 in 2016 signifies an improvement in the reporting status of the firm as they feel their social obligation towards the society (Reale, Magro and Ribas, 2018). Moderate and basic reporting graph is declining from 130 in initial period to 83 in 2016 is not good as this state depict the confusion state of companies who think basic reporting is not essential for their firm. 

Figure 4 Sustainable development goals

 These are standard sustainable development goals framed by the sustainable reporting council in Australia which needs to comply with all the businesses operate in Australia. No poverty, zero hunger, good health, equal education and gender equality belongs to social obligation (Agostini and Costa, 2018). Clean water, clean energy belongs to environmental obligation. Work and economic growth, industrial infrastructure, sustainable cities and rests other belongs to other obligation which is required to be adopted by an entity in order to provide healthy lifestyle to all the society members of Australia (Pintão, Chaves and Branco, 2018).   

Sustainable reporting matter a lot for Rio Tinto as they utilize aluminum in manufacturing lighter vehicles for its customers as this is recyclable and highly durable (Willats, Erlandsson, Molthan-Hill, Dharmasasmita and Simmons, 2018). By using eco- friendly business practices they contribute to three elements such as environmental by saving its resources, offering lighter vehicles to its users is one of the social obligations and lastly, low cost products are one of the economic objectives. In this way, aluminum contributes to building the sustainable society by reducing wastes in the manufacturing.     

This group also lays emphasis on reducing carbon emissions by producing metals as generally the production of metal generates higher carbon emission (Reynolds, Blackmore, Ison Shah and Wedlock, 2018). Decreasing the levels of carbon is taken as one of the challenges by the firm in setting up a large base of loyal customers. Challenge for the firm is to utilize cent percent electricity used in the metal smelting process for metal production in the form of renewable resources. Electricity can produce using biogas in which all wet and bio-degradable waste is converted into electricity to save the money as well as environmental resources.

Nowadays, electricity becomes the depletion resource due to excessively used by businesses in the manufacturing process (Gauthier and Wooldridge, 2018). Results of this project will amaze rivals who produce the similar products that this project manages to reduce 20% of carbon emissions, 65% carbon footprint and 39% reduction in greenhouse gas released during the manufacturing of the metals and minerals. 

Rio Tinto has a large set of stakeholders such as employees, shareholders, investors, society, and government. For producing metals and minerals the group is required to take permission from the society members and government in using the environmental resources within the standard limits (Ritala and et. al.,  2018). The act of industry may affect the local residents residing near the industries as the waste of the industry is disposed to the rivers and roads which create difficulties for them in living their life freely. Participation of the society is essential to increase the social image of the firm in front of all the internal as well as external users.

RIO Tinto is recommended to create a special programme for their stakeholders in order to provide all the services such as food, shelter, and cloth to all their employees at the initial stage to boost their performance. By doing, this government will support the firm in financial terms in fulfilling all their dreams. 

Conclusion

It can summarize from the above report that sustainable reporting in Australia is increasing from one period to another due to higher market awareness. Current sustainable reporting of Rio Tinto emphasizes on environmental and social will help in boosting the economic or financial performance of the firm.

Reference

Agostini, M. and Costa, E., 2018. Financial and Sustainability Reporting: An Empirical Investigation of Their Relationship in the Italian Context. In Sustainability and Social Responsibility: Regulation and Reporting (pp. 411-441). Springer, Singapore.

Ceulemans, K., Stough, T. and Lambrechts, W., 2018. Pioneering in sustainability reporting in higher education: Experiences of a Belgian business faculty. In Handbook of Sustainability Science and Research (pp. 211-231). Springer, Cham.

Corbett, J., Webster, J. and Jenkin, T. A., 2018. Unmasking corporate sustainability at the project level: exploring the influence of institutional logics and individual agency. Journal of Business Ethics. 147(2). pp.261-286.

Gauthier, J. and Wooldridge, B., 2018. Sustainability Ratings and Organizational Legitimacy: The Role of Compensating Tactics. In Sustainability and Social Responsibility: Regulation and Reporting (pp. 141-157). Springer, Singapore.

Lodhia, S. K., 2018. 1 Mining and sustainable development. Mining and Sustainable Development: Current Issues.

Pintão, S., Chaves, C. and Branco, M. C., 2018. Employees’ recognition of corporate sustainability: a case study. Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society.

Reale, R., Magro, T. C. and Ribas, L. C., 2018. Measurement and analyses of biodiversity conservation actions of corporations listed in the Brazilian stock exchange's corporate sustainability index. Journal of Cleaner Production. 170. pp.14-24.

Reynolds, M., Blackmore, C., Ison, R., Shah, R. and Wedlock, E., 2018. The role of systems thinking in the practice of implementing sustainable development goals. In Handbook of Sustainability Science and Research (pp. 677-698). Springer, Cham.

Ritala, P., and et.al.,  2018. Sustainable business model adoption among S&P 500 firms: A longitudinal content analysis study. Journal of Cleaner Production. 170. pp.216-226.

Sassen, R. and Azizi, L., 2018. Assessing sustainability reports of US universities. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education.

Talbot, D. and Boiral, O., 2018. GHG reporting and impression management: An assessment of sustainability reports from the energy sector. Journal of Business Ethics. 147(2). pp.367-383.

Willats, J., Erlandsson, L., Molthan-Hill, P., Dharmasasmita, A. and Simmons, E., 2018. A University Wide Approach to Embedding the Sustainable Development Goals in the Curriculum—A Case Study from the Nottingham Trent University’s Green Academy. In Implementing Sustainability in the Curriculum of Universities (pp. 63-78). Springer, Cham.

Rio Tinto, 2017. Available through: <https://www.riotinto.com/aboutus/about-rio-tinto-5004.aspx> [Accessed on 26^th January 2018].