At Yamana, ensuring the wellbeing of our people, continually working toward environmental stewardship and a low-carbon future, and creating shared benefits with host communities are integral elements of all our operations. Yamana recognizes the importance of striving to meet and exceed our responsibility objectives, and the role these efforts have in delivering on our overall objective of creating value for all stakeholders.
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) are the three principal factors under which the impacts and responsibility of our business activities are measured. ESG topics span all departments in our Company – those related to health and safety, environment and community (HSEC) are managed by Yamana’s HSEC corporate, regional and site teams, and disclosed in the Responsibility section of this website. The remaining social and governance topics are the shared responsibility of departments across our Company and publicly disclosed on their appropriate pages. Yamana is committed to disclose and continuously improve our ESG performance.
What does our vision One Team, One Goal: Zero mean to Yamana? It means zero health and safety incidents, zero community incidents and zero environmental incidents across all of our sites. It emphasizes that we are all working towards a common goal and demonstrates our ongoing commitment to improving our health and safety, environment and community (HSEC) performance. The vision is embedded throughout the organization and acts as a reminder that everyone is responsible for the HSEC performance of our Company. Our vision is also about going beyond zero as we believe that when done well, ESG excellence provides benefits to worker and community health, the environment and host communities and societies.
The Integrated HSEC Management Framework outlines our approach and provides strategic guidance on health and safety, environment and community relations. The framework is intentionally focused on management effectiveness and a transition towards the complete integration of HSEC responsibilities throughout the entirety of our Company. This proactive, risk-based management tool is based on evolving international best practice and allows sites to focus on their specific challenges, while still being unified in their approach to HSEC management.
The framework is composed of five pillars, Leadership, People, Planning, Systems & Processes, and Performance, and three functional elements, Health & Safety, Environmental Management and Social Risk Management.
We believe the best way to protect our employees, host communities and environment is to control, reduce and mitigate risks before they turn into incidents. As a result, one key component of our strategy is a shift away from sole reliance on lagging indicators to a balance of leading and lagging indicators.
The use of leading indicators is an emerging industry trend, where reporting focuses on predictive measurements, such as potential incidents or data linked to key risks. The purpose of leading indicators is to influence change to avoid or mitigate incidents before they occur. Similar to lagging indicators, leading indicators are specific and measurable. Leading indicators encourage behaviour, activities, and the implementation of systems and controls that will positively affect operational performance. This type of report has helped us reduce the number of incidents to reach our vision of zero. We continue to measure lagging indicators, such as our total recordable incident rate, and the existence of environmental or social incidents as they are still important performance measures. All indicators are reported to site and corporate senior management on a monthly basis.
The HSEC Improvement Plans are the most important elements to ensure our operations achieve not only compliance, but evolving international best practice. To meet our vision of zero, we created the HSEC Performance Index, a detailed set of indicators used to define and measure operational performance in key areas. A primary element of the Performance Index, the HSEC Improvement Plans are comprehensive tools that each site uses to proactively identify key risks and opportunities and to monitor overall HSEC performance. They are developed by the operations and revised annually, based on the previous years’ performance, to ensure continuous improvement and ensure that focus and attention is given to aspects that become topical. Developing, measuring and evaluating the HSEC Improvement Plans is a four-step process.
Benchmark for best practices and standards
Site-specific indicators that monitor key risks
Climate change, water and biodiversity
Quantitative analysis of social license
Frameworks for monitoring & continuous improvement
Hazards, risks, priorities and controls
Community issues and concerns
Investigations to reduce future incidents
Activities for managing fatal risks
Each input is used independently to gauge site-specific performance, to identify key risks and opportunities, and to prioritize performance improvements.
Drafted by each site’s HSEC Manager, in consultation with HSEC Team
Incorporates key risks and opportunities identified during Step 1: Analysis & Evaluation
Includes site-specific action plans, indicators and metrics for the year
Prioritizes key issues on a site-by-site basis, including a weighting applied to each metric
The HSEC Improvement Plans incorporate business priorities, risk analysis and review of past performance, and reflect the challenges and opportunities at the site-level to ensure that HSEC performance is optimized.
The HSEC Improvement Plans are reviewed, updated and approved annually by the site General Manager and regional and corporate HSEC personnel before being integrated into the overall site plans and budgets, and approved by senior management and the Board of Directors.
Completion of the HSEC Improvement Plans contributes significantly to our operations’ compensation and is also factored into executive compensation. The corporate HSEC team and the Senior Vice President, Health, Safety & Sustainable Development (SVP HSSD) receive regular updates on progress of the plans throughout the year and provide support and guidance to site teams on achieving objectives, where necessary.
The site HSEC managers review and report their performance against the HSEC Improvement Plans quarterly and annually to the HSEC Regional Director, the corporate HSEC team and the Senior Executive Group for verification and approval.
One of the ways we have accelerated this unified responsibility for HSEC across Yamana is by linking site and executive compensation, specifically bonuses, with HSEC performance. The HSEC Performance Index instills and ensures a sense of ownership and accountability for HSEC targets across the organization and provides incentives to employees to embed HSEC into their day-to-day activities.
HSEC performance targets in operations’ compensation generally include the number of social and environmental incidents, as well as achievement of site-specific action plans to improve our health and safety, environment and community relation performance. Executive compensation HSEC performance targets include leading and lagging indicators related to health and safety, environmental, social and tailings management performance. In 2020, the Company added a GHG reduction target to the 2020 compensation scorecard. In 2021, both short and long-term compensation for executives will include specific targets that support our Climate Change Strategy.
Having HSEC targets directly linked to compensation ensures that HSEC considerations are incorporated into all aspects of the business, and that targets are appropriately defined, managed and measured. Uniform and site-specific compensation targets ensure that employees are compensated for meeting their site’s unique challenges and promote the continued focus on management activities that improve performance. This link to compensation also demonstrates to all employees and stakeholders our corporate commitment to HSEC performance and excellence.
For more information on our compensation policies, please see the Management Information Circular and the blog post on ESG and compensation-related matters by Yamana Founder and Executive Chairman, Peter Marrone.
Yamana is committed to:
Respecting human rights, including those of Indigenous Peoples
Implementing processes to ensure no child or forced labour
Not contributing to conflict
Respectful and meaningful engagement with communities
Maximizing opportunities for local employment and local procurement
Ethical business conduct free of corruption and bribery
Transparency on government payments
Ensuring senior-level accountability and responsibility for Yamana’s business activities
Understanding the impacts of our business
The highest standards of health and safety and promoting the wellbeing of our people
Respecting labour rights and promoting positive labour relations
Promoting diversity and fostering inclusion
The highest standards in tailings management and governance
Water stewardship through efficient use, especially in water-stressed areas
Ensuring no adverse effects to the overall quality of water resources, recognizing that access to clean water is a human right
Protecting and conserving biodiversity and not operating in World Heritage Sites
Environmental stewardship and minimizing our impacts across all facets of our operations
Responsibly managing our energy use and greenhouse gas emissions
Responsible reclamation and mine closure
Through ongoing, informed dialogue with our stakeholders, ranging from community consultation to engagement with investors, we ensure that we are in constant communication with a range of relevant stakeholders. We drill down into specific material topics with each stakeholder group to explicitly ask which issues are most critical and how we can best communicate our performance.
Frequent engagement with investor community through specific and targeted outreach.
Targeted meetings around feedback on ratings and general meetings with key stakeholders in this space to understand/update the materiality of issues to the ESG community.
Engagement with our neighbouring communities on a daily basis through both formal and informal mechanisms. See our Community Relations page for more information.
Frequent engagement with all levels of government to strengthen relationships and economic development.
Our employees and contractors are engaged through many formal and informal methods, including: meetings with management, unions and health and safety teams, as well as through employee surveys.
Engagement with local and international development partner organizations to design and execute community programming.
Engagement on emerging issues, as appropriate. In Canada and our host countries, we seek opportunities to engage proactively on issues that have the potential to pose future risks to our organization and to help clarify our systems and performance.