Chief Executive Officer's review of strategic pillar 2
2
Pillar 2
Build on our leading commitment to ESG
Sustainability has long been part of Gold Fields' way of doing business, and ESG issues are integrated into the operational management of our mines and projects.
Over the past few years, ESG has also become increasingly critical to our stakeholders. In response, we pivoted from a functional approach to one that is strategic and makes a firm commitment to ESG.
To support this strategy, in December 2021, we launched a dedicated ESG strategic pillar and announced a range of ESG targets for 2030, covering health and safety, gender diversity, stakeholder value creation, water and tailings management, and climate change.
The 2030 targets and our performance against them are depicted in the table below.
In developing these targets, Gold Fields sought to address the following key ESG requirements:
- Issues of broader societal responsibility, including ensuring the safety, health and wellbeing of our people, a diverse workforce, and addressing the needs and expectations of our stakeholders – particularly our host communities
- The urgent need to mitigate our operations' impact on the environment and the communities around them, including focusing on climate change, tailings management, water stewardship, nature and integrated mine closure
- The importance of entrenching and strengthening sound governance across the Company
Further reflecting the integration of ESG considerations into the business is the fact that the payment terms of two sustainability-linked, five-year loans we entered into during 2023 are linked to three sustainability KPIs.
These are:
- Improving women representation in our total workforce from Gold Fields' 23% level in 2022
- Increasing the amount of reused/recycled water from the 75% of total water consumption achieved in 2022
- An abatement in Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions through renewable energy projects
Over the following few pages of this report, as well as in the accompanying Report to Stakeholders and Climate Change Report, we will be discussing the performance against these targets in greater detail.
Our performance against strategic priorities – our 2030 ESG targets
| How we measure success | 2030 target | Status | 2023 performance |
2022 performance |
| Fatalities | 0 |  |
2 | 1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Serious injuries | 0 | |
6RA | 5 |
| Serious environmental incidents | 0 |  |
0RA | 0 |
| Female representation | 30% of total employees |  |
25% | 23% |
| Total value creation for host communities | 30% of total value creation | |
33%RA | 27% |
| New legacy programmes for host communities | 6 | |
1 | 0 |
| Reduce absolute emissions from 2016 baseline (Scope 1 and 2)1 | 50% | |
-12% | -18% |
| Reduce net emissions from 2016 baseline (Scope 1 and 2) | 30% | |
-4% | +1% |
| Reduce net emissions from 2022 baseline (Scope 3) | 10% | |
-3% | N/A |
| Conform with the GISTM | Conform by 2025 | |
On track | On track |
| Reduce the number of active upstream-raised TSFs | 3 | |
4 | 5 |
| Water recycled or reused | 80% of total water used | |
74%RA | 75% |
| Reduce freshwater use from 2018 baseline | 45% | |
39% | 41% |
Achieved Not achieved On track
| 1 | The absolute emissions reduction (i.e. the emissions avoided compared to business-as-usual) deteriorated from 2022 to 2023 because the emissions factors of the gas electricity generation plants at Damang and Tarkwa are now higher than the Ghana grid emissions factor. While the plants continue to provide energy security they do not currently reduce Gold Fields' emissions against the baseline |