Anglo American partnership

FFI and Anglo American launched our partnership to safeguard biodiversity in 2008.

FFI recognised that Anglo American was striving for best practice in biodiversity management. We saw that helping the company to improve its policies and practices towards biodiversity could create real conservation benefits.

Key objectives of the partnership

In our second term, which commenced in 2011, FFI and Anglo American aim to:

1. Improve Anglo American’s biodiversity management framework, policies and practices resulting in reputational benefits
2. Anticipate emerging issues relating to biodiversity and enable Anglo American to respond timeously
3. Develop and test new concepts and approaches to biodiversity management and conservation
4. Build mutual capacity to understand and manage biodiversity and ecosystem services impacts and dependencies
5. Build resilience and sustainability into Anglo American’s approach to biodiversity management
6. Support FFI and partners to use best practice in addressing livelihoods and governance issues in their conservation programmes

Integrating biodiversity into the company

The partnership has already brought about some key progress within Anglo American.

So far, FFI has developed the High Level Biodiversity Risk Assessment tool and a Benchmark to help the company understand where it sits within the sector with respect to biodiversity management.

We have also led some of the site-specific Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) Peer Reviews, which are critical for achieving measurable reductions to biodiversity impacts.

For example, FFI reviewed the BAP for Mogalakwena mine in 2009 and recommended that staff initiate a monitoring programme around the rehabilitated waste rock dumps to ensure that rehabilitation has been successful.

Building capacity

FFI assists Anglo American operations in identifying biodiversity risk and opportunity on their sites and continue to support staff with this. When FFI carries out BAP peer reviews, Anglo American staff are present, learning about the process and assisting in the review.

FFI also learns from the partnership, building up our knowledge of specific environments and mining sector issues.

 The road ahead

FFI believes our partnership with Anglo American will continue to help shift business as usual. Our experts are challenging the company to have a positive influence on global biodiversity.

We hope that others will learn from our collaboration to both improve the mining sector’s practices towards the environment and also encourage more partnerships between NGOs and extractive companies.