Quality of the Mining Sector’s Sustainability Disclosure: A Regional Scoring and Comparison of Sustainability Reports from Canada, South Africa, and Europe

ABSTRACT

The mining sector, and its extraction of precious metals and minerals, has contributed to massive economic growth of several nations and corporations. It is undeniable that mining plays an important role the world today: as Mancini et al. (2018) state, “mineral resources are at the basis of modern societies”. Since the 1990s, the mining sector has been the first to adopt non-financial disclosures, due in part to intense public scrutiny of environmental and social impacts. Despite this pioneering, issues related to report quality, credibility, motivations, and completeness are present. There has been a clear call for more transparent reporting, multi-stakeholder consultation, and a systems-based/holistic approach to non- financial disclosures. Using an original scoring tool, this paper will score and assess the perceived quality of 45 published sustainability/integrated reports from mining companies in Canada, European nations, and South Africa. This assessment demonstrates that Canadian, European, and South African mining companies’ disclosure of sustainability performance and initiatives via reports are on average incredibly similar, but individually highly variable. From the results of this scoring and comparison, South African mining company sustainability/integrated reports are marginally of higher quality than its European and Canadian counterparts. Governance and strategy/management indicators were the most consistently disclosed in a high-quality manner A universal theme among the results is the significant variability in the average scores of each individual sustainability report. Potential solutions to address quality and credibility include a more holistic, systems-thinking approach to sustainability reporting and mandatory external assurance completed by an independent, diverse group of third-party auditors.