Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our Social Value in Action briefing. My name is Dinesh Bishop, and I am the Vice President of Investor Relations at BHP. I would like to introduce you to Caroline Cox, our Chief Legal, Governance and External Affairs Officer. Since 2020, Caroline has been our Group Executive, responsible for functions covering sustainability and non-financial risk, including governance, climate change, community and human rights, ethics and Indigenous relations. Caroline will lead the 45-minute briefing today, and we will also allow some time afterwards for you to ask questions. I will help moderate this session. Caroline, would you like to begin?
Thank you, Dinesh, and hello, everyone. I start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land I'm on today, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, and acknowledge that across the world, our operations are on or near the custodial lands of First Nations people. I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all First Nations people joining us today. Three years ago, we introduced to the market the initial details of our commitment to social value. Today, I want to update you on how we have progressed in embedding that commitment into our thinking, our planning, and our performance. I also wanna share with you important new initiatives that will further sharpen our focus and provide transparency on our goals and our outcomes. There are three key developments that I will cover.
The first is our new social value framework, which identifies six social value priorities based on where we can have the most impact, and also what will deliver business value and shareholder value. Secondly, I will take you through our new and our first social value scorecard. This includes 2030 goals, milestones, and metrics, and we will report on this annually. Finally, I will update you on how we are integrating social value into everything we do at BHP. I strongly believe in the criticality of this work. I grew up in small town Alberta, Canada, and I saw firsthand the very real impact that corporates can have on the landscape and people's lives. I saw this again recently when I returned to Canada to visit our Jansen site in Saskatchewan, and I spent time with our employees, also with suppliers, government, and community members.
This experience and engagements really brought home to me again how we can work together and make a real positive outcome for people, the planet, and our business. While I was there, the Premier of Saskatchewan, Scott Moe, also reflected on the Jansen project, and I wanna share with you a couple of things that he said. He said, "BHP's presence means opportunity that will ripple through the province for generations to come. And all of this is driven by a spirit of genuine partnership, not transactional interactions." This really lies at the heart of what we wanna talk about today. It's about running our business in a way that delivers long-term sustainable value and opportunities for BHP, our shareholders, and the broader community. Social value starts with our purpose, to bring people and resources together to build a better world.
The commodities we produce at BHP are essential to everyday life, from infrastructure that connects us globally, to the raw materials that are necessary for decarbonization and renewable energy, and now with potash to food security. Beyond supporting these critical global needs, we provide significant economic contribution to the communities and countries where we operate. In FY 2021, we provided $40 billion in wages, taxes, royalties, dividends, and payments to suppliers. The benefits derived from BHP's commodities, and importantly how we produce them, are the cornerstone of our purpose and social value. Social value is BHP's positive contribution to society. Our people, partners, the economy, the environment, local communities, and shareholders. All of this is anchored in enduring, mutually beneficial, and trusting relationships. This commitment is being built into our strategy and the thousands and thousands of decisions we make across the business every day.
We do recognize that the decisions we make can have a positive or a negative impact, and we need to take that into account in how they impact both the environment and communities. Our aim with social value is to be deliberate and proactive in taking into account both social and financial impact in those decisions that we make. Doing this well is essential to business outcomes and long-term shareholder value. Some of you may recall this slide from the last time we did a briefing on social value in 2019. On the right, you will see the outcomes, the competitive advantages that come from embedding social value. In short, it comes down to access, and I'll give you a couple of recent examples. First, in terms of access to resources.
We recently received a license approval from the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation to increase our iron ore operations up to 330 million tons per annum. The application took into account considerations around the community, water, environment, and the workforce. Having gained this license, it gives us flexibility to execute options of growth in response to positive market conditions. Another very recent example is from a couple of weeks ago, where the Canadian federal government committed CAD 100 million to the Jansen Project. It was very clear when this was announced by the Canadian Prime Minister and one of his ministers that this was linked to our position on greenhouse gas emissions, diversity, and indigenous partnerships. Second, access to partners and markets. Producing some of the lowest carbon intensity nickel has given us access to supply agreements with Tesla and Toyota.
Third, access to talent. People are the core of our business. Diversity, we have seen unlocks better safety outcomes, productivity, and innovation, and we know that our commitment to sustainability is improving engagement levels. Finally, on access to capital. We know that all of these elements I've spoken about are important to investors and will increase our access to the equity and debt markets. Essentially, the commodities we produce and how we produce them are our resume. They will open the door to future opportunities, partnerships, capital, and talent. Our commitment to sustainability is not new. It is one of our charter values. This slide reflects the steps we have taken over a number of years. Take climate. In 1998, we were one of the first large companies to publish our operational greenhouse gas emissions.
A year ago, we were the first company in Australia to put forward a say on climate vote on our Climate Transition Action Plan, or CTAP, which received close to 85% shareholder support. On diversity, we were the first resources company to set an aspirational goal of gender balance by 2025. When we set that ambition in 2016, we had about 17% women. Today, we're sitting at 32%. As you will see on this slide, over that same period, we've continued to deliver strong shareholder returns. We've also, in this period, delivered tangible outcomes. On safety, we've been fatality-free for three years. On environment, our fresh water withdrawals have reduced by nearly 30% since FY 2017. That's approximately double our target.
On decarbonization, our operational greenhouse gas emissions have decreased by 20% since FY 2020, and we expect to spend around $4 billion up to 2030 to achieve our goals. We also continue to work across the value chain to reduce Scope 3 emissions. This includes partnering with four steel producers in Asia, representing approximately 12% of reported global steel production. Finally, over and above our other contributions, we continue to contribute at least 1% of profits to local communities on community and environmental projects and also to support the BHP Foundation. A highlight of the BHP Foundation's work, as reflected on the slide, is the Ten Deserts Project, which is the largest network of indigenous-led conservation areas in the world, covering about 30% of the Australian geography.
With this strong foundation, it was clear to me when I came into my role how the concept of social value really resonated with employees and also with broader stakeholders. I could also see that there was the opportunity to take it to the next level. We can have more impact and move faster if we apply greater discipline and consolidate our efforts, focusing first on where we can have the most impact, and then also taking into account business drivers, such as what is gonna give us access to customers or resource, as we just talked about. Taking all of that into account and feedback that we receive from investors and stakeholders, we've identified the six pillars that are outlined on this slide. This framework has been approved by our board.
The six pillars, as you can see, are decarbonization, healthy environment, indigenous partnerships, safe, inclusive, and future-ready workforce, thriving, empowered communities and responsible supply chains. This new framework provides direction to all of us at BHP on where to focus our efforts and investments in order to deliver positive social value and also business value. This is a real step forward for us and adds rigor and discipline to our efforts. Building on this framework, I'm very pleased to now take you through our very first Social Value Scorecard. This provides clarity to our teams on the ambitions that we're setting for ourselves, and importantly, allows us to measure progress and transparently report and hold ourselves to account. At its core, this scorecard is about partnership, listening, and co-design.
This really reflects that it's not for us alone as a company to decide what is going to deliver value to communities or to the environment, and also recognizes that for us to play a role in addressing complex issues like climate change, we need to work in collaboration with third parties. Now, this is a lot of detail on this slide, so I'm gonna take you through it in turn. There are really three components. On the top line are our new 2030 goals. Each contributes to relevant UN sustainable development goals. On your left, decarbonization will be familiar to you from our Climate Transition Action Plan, which we released last year, and that encompasses our existing targets and goals as set out in the CTAP.
The rest, however, is new, and it includes our new 2030 goal to create nature-positive outcomes, and also our goals to co-create plans with communities and Indigenous partners. The second row are a set of key metrics. These metrics are not targets, but rather indicators to show how we're tracking against the goals. There are a couple things that I wanna point out in relation to these metrics. The first is that this is an initial iteration. These metrics will evolve over time. Second, as mentioned, we are capturing through these metrics third-party views on BHP's performance. For example, if you look under community and also responsible supply chains, we do include the voices and feedback from those third parties rather than just self-assessing our performance. Thirdly, I note that some of these metrics are future metrics.
For example, under the healthy environment pillar, we've outlined that we will establish natural capital accounts to measure our performance. We don't have those yet, but we wanted to provide insight as to where we're headed. Finally, in the third row are the initial milestones for FY 2023 and 2024. These will also continue to evolve, but they give you a sense of the key milestones towards achieving the goal. We will disclose our performance against all of this in our annual report. Now, as I said, this is a lot to take in, so what we're going to do is really give you more detail on a couple of these pillars, starting first with the healthy environment. I'm really pleased to now hand over to Anne Dekker, our Vice President of Environment, who has over 30 years of experience in environment management. Anne?
Thanks, Caroline. It's great to be here. BHP has an aspiration to become a nature-positive company, and there are a number of actions that we would take that underpins that. Today, I'm really excited to announce one of the most significant actions on our journey, and that's our 2030 healthy environment goal. We will focus on the creation of nature-positive outcomes by having at least 30% of the area of land and water that we steward under nature-positive management practices. So why are we focusing on nature-positive? The World Economic Forum has identified biodiversity loss as one of the greatest global risks. Scientists tell us that to halt and reverse species loss and to protect the vital ecosystems that are the foundations of economic stability, that we need to put nature on the path to recovery by the end of this decade.
That includes to protect 30% of the Earth's land and oceans by 2030. I'm really encouraged that almost 100 countries around the world have already committed to this 30x30 challenge. In the past, BHP has had commitments of no net loss of biodiversity and zero significant environmental events within our operational disturbance area. We've also made voluntary conservation investments in areas outside of our footprint, and some of these include the Martu Living Deserts program in Western Australia, the Valdivian Coastal Reserve in Chile, and the Five Rivers Reserve in Tasmania. Now with our new goal, we're going to be focusing on within our footprint. That's noting that our operational disturbance area is only 2% of the 6 million hectares of land that we own, lease, and manage.
Of those 6 million hectares, most of that is retained for exploration tenements, or it's leased to third parties for agricultural use. To achieve our 2030 goal, we're gonna focus on the areas of highest ecosystem value, including intersections of those with our operational footprint. Working alongside Indigenous partners and communities to create nature-positive management actions on that land, including conservation, improved land management, and restoration. We see that effectively managing that land and understanding what the impact of the actions we take can only be possible through the development of natural capital accounts. You'll see that on our metrics and our milestones. Natural capital accounts are a way to measure the amount and the quality and the value of environmental assets in a certain area. They also describe changes in ecosystems and how that has impacts on wellbeing and on economies.
Through these natural capital accounts, BHP will be able to tell what the changes and the improvements in our natural assets are as a result of the nature-positive actions that we take. We're currently piloting natural capital accounting, which we think is going to be a first for the Australian or for the mining industry globally, with partners, including the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization of Australia. Thanks, Caroline. I'll hand back to you.
Thanks a lot, Anne. Just to give you some perspective on the goal that Anne has just taken us through, 30% of the land and water that we steward is around 2 million hectares, which is around half the size of Switzerland. We're aiming to create nature-positive outcomes on an area of that size by 2030. We will pursue this, as Anne said, in partnership with Indigenous communities and other community stakeholders through conservation, improved land management, and restoration. I now wanna talk more about the Indigenous partnership pillar. As I said at the outset, we operate on or near the custodial lands of First Nations people across our operations. We recognize and welcome that this brings with it a special responsibility. Our aim is to be a partner of choice for Indigenous peoples, respecting rights, listening, and creating relationships based on trust and mutual benefit.
This will take time. We have made mistakes in the past, and we are determined to do better. The more we listen and learn, the more we understand how we could have acted differently. This knowledge informs our plans for the future. One of the first things I did when I came into my role was to set up the first truly global Indigenous team within BHP. That team is now over 60% Indigenous and 100% Indigenous-led. This new Indigenous partnership goal that we're announcing today is another important step forward in our relationship with Indigenous peoples. To measure our performance, we will disclose relationship health as assessed by Indigenous partners, not by a self-assessment from BHP. We will also report on our progress on co-created plans.
In terms of the milestones, in FY 2023, we will release a new Indigenous Peoples' strategy, and we will also increase Indigenous voices in formal decision-making. In FY 2024, we will complete the first tranche of co-created plans. I now wanna share with you a video that we've put together with the Jigalong community, which really shows the evolution in our approach in line with our new 2030 goal.
I've dealt with BHP for a long time. It's always been through a revolving door. Since Native Title and sitting down and explaining our heritage and where we're coming from and what we wanted out of our land, their outlook on Native Title and Aboriginal people in this area has changed 110%.
The history of mining and Native Title holders hasn't always been fantastic. I think over time, a company like BHP, we've seen it change in that relationship. From one of being a benefactor, if you like, for royalties and so forth, and wanting economic value for the country through to really starting to listen to the needs of the Native Title holders. This BHP agreement was a major departure from that and a step forward to more contemporary thinking. Really, it's the vision. It's where people see they want benefits for their community, their children, their grandchildren, over, you know, a long relationship. It's not about one or two years, but it's actually decades. Examples would be around health, around land management, around business development, around maintenance of law and culture.
Historically, if you look backwards at some of our earlier agreements. The language has been very aspirational. Our targets have been very aspirational. I think agreements such as the Jigalong agreement, they transcended those, the barriers I think were there that were inhibiting our relationship with our Traditional Owners. Four years ago, when I was sitting on the community side of the table, we had very limited number of Indigenous employees in Jigalong that actually worked across BHP sites. Now we're probably looking at 40, 50 with our recent program. That agreement, in effect, has had huge social benefit and economic benefit.
I've been running the Work Ready Program for since 2019. The objective of the program is to get our traditional owners work ready to go out and gain full-time employment within BHP Nickel West Northern Operations.
I did the Jigalong Work Ready in like 2019. Like, my son's in it at the moment, so hopefully that works out good for him like it has for me.
With BHP Nickel West, they've given us an opportunity. They've basically asked us, "What's your capability up to and what can you do?" They've done a pretty good job at the moment of doing carve-outs of what jobs we're capable of doing. The role they play is significant, giving us sort of long-term work and sustainable work. That's how our Indigenous businesses grow.
Mining may come and go. The Native Title holders will be there for generations, going on hopefully for thousands of years. What's done now, through the support, through the BHP relationship, could well be a very important legacy for the future.
We have a number of agreements currently in train. We're creating that environment where we can have those constructive and robust discussions, and create a pathway forward. We have to have them engaged. We have to have them sitting at the table. We need to have their voices resonating across our business because we're, you know, actually guests on the traditional lands of our Aboriginal stakeholders in this country. As such, we should be acknowledging and recognizing the status that they play.
We've spent some time today talking about our new framework and also the Social Value Scorecard. These, as I've said, are really designed to focus our efforts on the things that are going to drive the most social value and business value. We also know that frameworks are only going to take us so far, and the things that are going to drive the most value are if we can really embed this in our strategy, our plans and processes, and our culture. Now, we're approaching this both top-down and bottom-up. Top-down, it starts with our board and our leadership team, incorporating social value into our strategy and things like KPIs, which then filter down into the organization and also impact on remuneration. At an operational level, our teams are building social value into their asset plans, which then feed into decisions on capital allocation.
All of this is underpinned bottom-up by our culture. I'm gonna talk about each of these in turn. Starting first with strategy. An example of social value consideration in our strategic decision-making is our recent decision in relation to New South Wales Energy Coal. In both setting up the bid process and then evaluating bids, we took into account financial drivers as well as sustainability and rehabilitation credentials of bidders. We also took into account the interests of employees and communities. We're now at the stage of working with relevant stakeholders and partners to co-create a sustainable and responsible pathway to closure. The plan will balance economic, community, environment, workforce, and rehabilitation factors and will also be taking into account the principles that are set out in this slide. Turning to operational planning.
We'll hear a short video now from the General Manager of Integrated Operations at Spence in Chile, who will talk about how social value is being built into asset plans.
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That takes us to the important topic of capital allocation, and I'm gonna hand over to Graeme O'Bourne to discuss this, who leads our capital decision and evaluation process.
Thank you, Caroline. Social value is a core part of our capital allocation processes to ensure we are positioned to capture business value. Our capital decisions prioritize best investments in social value where we determine the greatest benefit will be generated. Importantly, these investments are not granted a free pass. Our capital allocation framework considers social value as part of the capital spend required to ensure continued safe and sustainable operations. As such, our ability to meet our company-wide social value goals and targets are considered alongside the traditional financial metrics, like return on capital employed, free cash flow, and commodity balance. This ensures that social value is increasingly hardwired into our decision-making at all levels of the organization. This slide outlines examples of social value pillars embedded and evaluated in our capital decisions. Social value initiatives are generally not standalone, such as a decarbonization project.
More often, our projects generate mutual value across multiple social value pillars. The examples on this slide are just a small selection of recently executed and current projects that demonstrate the diversity of those opportunities. Examples of social value benefits generated for our stakeholders include establishing foundational infrastructure to reduce greenhouse emissions and improve safety from our operated assets through projects like trolley-assisted Escondida, which is currently in the selection phase, and autonomous haulage and autonomous shipping, which are in execution at BMA and WAIO. We continue to integrate how we evaluate social value in every capital allocation decision. We currently have under pilot a suite of tools to build our practices and capability in this space. These tools provide a holistic approach to evaluating financial and non-financial considerations to deliver optimal outcomes.
On the slide, we have a worked example of a water project, which in this particular case, highlights the material importance of water source and cultural significance to traditional owners alongside operational risk and cost considerations. The first tool on the left helps project teams systematically identify what social value considerations are important. A key aspect is adopting a stakeholder perspective of value and connecting the project to our social value strategies, policies, and targets. The second tool in the middle helps teams more consistently analyze financial and non-financial criteria to determine the optimized investment alternative. The third element of the framework on the right ensures decision-makers are fully informed based on the project's most material contributions to BHP's strategic objectives, including the Social Value Scorecard metrics Caroline outlined earlier.
Importantly, the investment returns will have factored in emissions intensity and carbon price, biodiversity impacts and water usage, traditional owner support and local community impacts, such as local procurement and the nature of the work, our workforce, such as FIFO. Of course, these are just tools and are complemented by the experience and judgment of our management to ensure that the weighting and allocation is in line with our overarching strategy and purpose. I'll now hand back to Caroline.
Thank you, Graeme. We've talked about our social value goals and how we're embedding them into our strategy, our operational plans, and capital allocation. I now wanna talk about how we're embedding it bottom up. Just like our experience with safety, we know that policies, procedures, and processes have an important role to play, but they won't carry you the entire way. It is culture that influences the thousands and thousands of decisions that are made across the organization every day. Our site-based general managers and their teams regularly make decisions that have a social value dimension. How can we improve the way we use water or recycle waste? What local or indigenous suppliers can we use? How can we make our workforce more inclusive through our equipment and ready for a diverse workforce?
These decisions depend upon leaders and their teams having the capability and authority to make considered choices the same way they do on safety. Social value is the responsibility of every person at BHP. To achieve this, we're embedding social value into our leadership capability requirements and training. We're also leveraging existing processes and training that we use for things like safety and operational excellence, including our BHP Operating System and field leadership. We're also continuing to include social value in our company-wide scorecards, and that then feeds into executive remuneration and company-wide remuneration. I wanna give an example of this cultural bottom-up approach in action. A couple of our employees in Yandi identified an opportunity to not only enhance the way we go about closure, but also to enhance very important relationships with Indigenous traditional owners.
Yandi is approaching the end of its mine life, and there is decades of closure work to do. The opportunity here was not only to engage with the Banjima on what they would like to see, but to actually physically involve them in the work in the rehabilitation and restoration of country.
Ross West, who is an environmentalist, had a fantastic idea of doing a tree nursery to help build up the stock of trees for site rehabilitation. That kind of dovetailed into discussions that we'd already had around engaging more Banjima Traditional Owners at Yandi, but also in these types of activities to build on the connection to country.
There's a lot of work going on in the background on how we can sustain trees or wooded plants, 'cause traditionally seeding by machinery, these plants haven't had a very high success rate. Tree nurseries have been proven to enhance or improve the success rate of the trees.
Ross and I took the concept to the GM, and his support basically turbocharged the project and enabled us to go from an initial thought around two trainees over five years to, you know, we're now planning 12 trainees for this financial year. The partnership is around working with organizations such as the Banjima Native Title Aboriginal Corporation on looking at the best ways to recruit trainees, understanding what type of outcomes that we would like to get for both them and ourselves is the imperative. It's a way of actually engaging traditional owners and developing the program itself with their support and their contributions.
Currently about 600 seedlings in our nursery now. We'll be looking at scaling that up to 5,000 from seeds themselves, so they'll be propagated by our team. Gradually working my way up to a five-year plan of up to 20,000 trees.
When we first done the nursery, I felt glad we got things up and running and that I feel more happy I'm working in my own country. There's more trees around it, you know, and that's Mother Nature's coming back now to heal the country.
This project is entirely funded by the closure provision at Yandi. Ultimately, the benefit here is we're doing it progressively and doing it sooner.
As much as, you know, getting the number of traditional owners into our business is important, it's also about how we maintain that relationship with traditional owners going forward and ensuring that they have a good experience within our company and that the connection that they have to us is a good one. We're proud of what we've done. You know, we've had a lot of lessons that we've learned, and it hasn't always been an easy journey, but it's something that we believe is important.
I think you'll find you have the people within your organizations that you know have this passion and have experience, and what really needs to happen is you kind of need to unlock that potential, give them the space and give them the resources to succeed. When that happens, when you have motivated people doing something they're passionate about, the results are often fantastic for everyone.
As I hope I've given you some insight into today, it's by getting the big and the little things right in a disciplined, consistent, and deeply embedded way that we continue to build BHP's social value advantage as a core component of our continued delivery of value creation. Today, we've outlined the competitive advantage created by social value, our new social value framework that focuses our efforts on areas of greatest impact. Our new Social Value Scorecard, which stretches our ambitions and provides more sophisticated ways of measuring our performance. Finally, how we're embedding social value in everything we do, whether it's capital allocation, the New South Wales Energy Coal Pathway to Closure, nature-positive plans, or in identifying a good idea on the ground. Social value is part of all of these decisions. It's an all-of-business approach, and it's being built in deliberately and in a focused way.
Continuing to put social value at the heart of our company will create opportunities for BHP, provide mutual benefit for our stakeholders, and deliver long-term value for shareholders.