What are the material issues the company has identified?

In its 2021 Integrated Annual Report Gold Fields identified a range of material issues, such as health and safety, human capital, environmental stewardship, human rights. Among these, creating economic value for its stakeholders stands out as a key material issue for Gold Fields.

Stakeholder engagement in accordance with the GRI Standards              

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) defines the Principle of Stakeholder Inclusiveness when identifying material issues (or a company’s most important impacts) as follows:

“The reporting organization shall identify its stakeholders, and explain how it has responded to their reasonable expectations and interests.”

Stakeholders must be consulted in the process of identifying a company’s most important impacts and their reasonable expectations and interests must be taken into account. This is an important cornerstone for CSR / sustainability reporting done responsibly.

Key stakeholder groups Gold Fields engages with:   

Stakeholder Group

Employees

Host communities

Financial market participants (shareholders, investors, capital providers and analysts)

Governments (national, regional and local) and regulators

Industry associations and mining peers

Media

Non-governmental and community-based organisations

Organised labour

Third parties (business partners, contractors and suppliers)

Traditional authorities

How stakeholder engagement was made to identify material issues

To identify and prioritise material topics Gold Fields engaged with its stakeholders through interviews, receiving input from employees, host communities, governments, industry associations, media, third parties and traditional authorities.

What actions were taken by Gold Fields to create economic value for its stakeholders?

In its 2021 Integrated Annual Report Gold Fields reports that it took the following actions for creating economic value for its stakeholders:

• Creating economic value for employees
• In 2021, Gold Fields paid US$463m in employee salaries and benefits.

• Creating economic value for capital providers
• In 2021, Gold Fields paid US$454m to capital providers (interest and dividend payments).

• Creating economic value for contractors and suppliers
• In 2021, Gold Fields paid US$2,101m to contractors and suppliers (operations and capital procurement).

• Creating economic value for governments
• In 2021, Gold Fields paid US$558m in mining royalties and land-use payments, taxes, duties and levies.

• Creating economic value for host communities
• In 2021, Gold Fields spent US$16m in host communities’ socio-economic development.

Which GRI Standards and corresponding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been addressed?

The GRI Standard addressed in this case is: Disclosure 201-1 Direct economic value generated and distributed

Disclosure 201-1 Direct economic value generated and distributed corresponds to:

• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
• Targets: 8.1, 8.2
• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
• Targets: 9.1, 9.4, 9.5

 

78% of the world’s 250 largest companies report in accordance with the GRI Standards

SustainCase was primarily created to demonstrate, through case studies, the importance of dealing with a company’s most important impacts in a structured way, with use of the GRI Standards. To show how today’s best-run companies are achieving economic, social and environmental success – and how you can too.

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References:

This case study is based on published information by Gold Fields, located at the link below. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses. However, we made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the report’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original please revert to the following link:

https://www.goldfields.com/pdf/investors/integrated-annual-reports/2021/iar-2021.pdf

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