Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Equinox Gold corporate update on ESG performance and targets. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, management will respond to asked questions. If you are participating through the webcast, you may submit a question in writing by using the text box in the lower left corner of the webcast frame. If you are listening by phone, you may submit your questions in writing by email to ir@equinoxgold.com. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Rhylin Bailie, Vice President, Investor Relations for Equinox Gold. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Ariel, and thank you everybody for joining us today for our first ESG-focused investor call. We will, of course, be making a number of forward-looking statements today, so please do visit our website, EDGAR and SEDAR, to read the rest of our continuous disclosure documents. We will also do our best to avoid using too many acronyms, but there may be a few that pop in there, so there is an acronym slide available on the presentation deck that you can download from the webcast. I will now turn the call over to Christian Milau, our CEO, for opening remarks.
Thanks, Rhylin, and, yeah, welcome everyone to the first call. This is on the back of our second ESG report, so if you wanna have a look at that, please, you know, go to our website. We continue to make improvements on our disclosure, and we're really proud of the work done over the last year. I just wanna briefly discuss the ESG management strategy, introduce the team. Mostly it'll be myself, Dennis, and Georgina talking today, but most of the rest of the team's in the room. This really is a team effort, and we do have a working group that's very active in ESG. I wanted to give them all a chance to answer your questions at the end if you have any.
I want to briefly discuss the ESG strategy and importantly, our vision, you know, which is to be a sustainability leader, which comes straight from the top. You know, we have very strong engagement from our ESG committee and our whole board and, you know, particularly Ross Beaty, who is an environmentalist at heart, but he also happens to be a miner, and we believe strongly in that the two can coexist. We're temporary custodians of the sites where we operate, and we wanna leave behind a positive legacy and to reclaim the sites in a good manner. All of that filters in and through everything that we do and the way we think here. We're committed to this strategy right down to the people with the boots on the ground.
When I turn over onto slide number five here and look at our vision and values, you know, as we say very directly there, we wanna responsibly and safely produce over a million ounces of gold per year while ensuring that we're creating value for all stakeholders. This is a strategy that we've had in place for a number of years now. It encompasses all the things that we believe in, and we do wanna have tangible economic and social benefits to our community partners that will endure beyond the life of mine as well. When you look at our values of excellence, integrity, accountability, and teamwork which define our culture, they also guide all of our actions, and we hope that you can see that throughout the way we operate in all the locations that we're in.
Also, in terms of an ESG strategy, you know, we really believe fundamentally we're not just doing this as a window dressing or a greenwashing exercise. You know, this has to fundamentally impact our business. Nowadays, particularly, we're seeing greater investor demand that companies reduce their impact, their emissions, their environmental impact as well, and report on that progress in a very transparent manner. Many investors will just simply not invest, as you know, without a comprehensive ESG disclosure and improvement platform in place with various companies in our sector nowadays. One key area that we've been planning and working on has been our GHG reductions today. Dennis will talk a bit more about that later.
We also believe fundamentally when we look at an area like that, you know, it needs to be good business as well as good for the ESG front. What we're doing is looking at areas where we can actually reduce our footprint, maybe save us some money, potentially reduce the tax burden in the long term. You know, here in Canada, there'll be a CAD 170 per ton tax by 2030. We wanna do our best to mitigate our footprint before that time. Also, we think in the long term too, the cost of capital is gonna go up for either debt financing or equity funding and investment in the long term if we don't address this. It's coming.
It's coming very quickly, and we found in the last couple of years, the focus on this area has been very, very big. It's really an integral part of our strategy. Turning over to the ESG strategy and performance, I'm just gonna briefly touch on a couple of slides here and then pass over to Georgina and Dennis. When I look at slide number seven and the 2021 report card, we always report on this in our management circular and our year-end meeting that Ross attends with us. I just wanted to highlight, you know, we're very proud that we've been able to improve on a few of our metrics. We've improved our total recordable injury frequency rate by almost 20%. We've improved our significant environmental incident frequency rate by almost or over 50%.
Those are good results over the prior year for a young company. We're also starting to implement in areas such as the Mining Association of Canada's Towards Sustainable Mining protocols. Dennis will talk a bit more about that. We've rolled out an enterprise risk management system across the organization, which goes from the ground up, right up to here to Vancouver in the corporate office. You know, we also want to acknowledge areas where we haven't achieved the goals that we intended. You know, one particular area, of course, is the blockade that we had at Los Filos in the middle of the year. We're hopeful those issues are behind us, and I know Georgina will touch more on that, and she has some intimate knowledge of that situation, and we'll cover that in a slide later on.
We're really looking to achieve a significant improvement in our ESG ratings as well on the back of all this. You know, despite expanding our disclosure with quarterly online reporting and some further key metrics, you know, we hope that over the next few years, we can just continue to evolve and address the gaps that we still have, and we acknowledge those at this stage. Over the long run, we just wanna make gradual continual progress, and that's one of our key fundamental plans here. Turning over to the next slide on the 2021 performance highlights. I'll just briefly touch on this again. You know, we've been really working on collecting baseline data required to understand things like our energy consumption and GHG emissions. During 2021, we set some short-term targets, you know, reducing our emissions by about 5%.
We achieved those last year. In the next 12 months, you know, Dennis is working very hard on setting some additional medium and long-term targets. We wanna take the time to do that and methodically think through that and have a plan and not just set a 2020 or 2050 target for net zero and not have a plan to back it up in the mid and shorter term. Also during 2021, I'm very proud of how all of the sites around the world, well, actually 2020 and 2021, operated and dealt with COVID. I think we made a positive impact on our communities and our workforce. People felt safe to come to work.
We've implemented strategies that are all tailored to the local sites, and we've really had very little, if almost no disruption in a material way at any of our locations. I'm gonna turn over now onto the next slide to Georgina.
Thanks, Christian. We wanted to focus our reporting efforts to the issues that are most relevant to our business and to our stakeholders. For that, we hire a firm to conduct this materiality assessment, and they use artificial intelligence to identify issues of interest, relevance, and impact in sources like online news and media, corporate reports of our peers, new regulation and policymaking voluntary initiatives in the countries where we operate. Out of this extended data analysis, we came up with 23 topics that are most relevant to our business today. With those 23 topics, we then sent out a survey to our direct stakeholders that included employees, contractors, investors, directors, and our community partners. In that survey, we asked them to rank those 23 topics in the order of most importance for them.
The results of both the external data sources and our stakeholder survey results were plotted in the matrix as you can see in this slide, ranking them from low to high importance. From that analysis, we identified nine key issues that are most relevant for our business and our stakeholders. Although all of the topics are important, we make sure that we do report on these issues. Now we are going to turn to start with the governance aspect. We know that the governance is what has our policies and guides all of our actions as a company. As I already mentioned, we have three layers of ESG leadership and oversight. We have the environmental, social, and governance committee in the board of directors that oversees performance and provides feedback to our ESG strategy.
We also have ESG working group comprised of the VPs of each relevant department, and this group meets regularly to discuss, develop, and implement our strategic initiatives and plans. This group is also accountable for ESG performance. Of course, we have our site teams, employees, and contractors who are responsible for implementing our strategy on a day-to-day basis. If we continue to the next slide, I would like to highlight three key achievements on the governance side that we had in 2021. We published our environment and climate change policy, as well as our social responsibility and human rights policy. These two policies are very important because they state our commitments that we have as a company and it state the principles that guide our actions.
Also by the end of 2021, all of our employees, directors, contractors, and management completed the code of ethics and policy compliance training. This was important to ensure that everybody understands what our principles are in our day-to-day performance and actions. This training included information on the use of the whistleblower mechanism that we have. In 2021, we received 44 submissions through the hotline. All of these submissions have been reviewed and addressed, and we can say that people are pretty comfortable on using these to raise their issues because we see that they are indeed using the hotline. We also committed last year to achieve 30% female representation on our board of directors by the AGM of 2023. If we go to the next slide.
During 2020, we became members of four important associations that we believe are the ones that most represent our profile as a company. As signatories of the United Nations Global Compact, we are committed to its principles for environmental protection, human rights, labor standards, and ethical business practices. Also compliance with the Responsible Gold Mining Principles of the World Gold Council has been reflected in our policies and standards. We are also as Christian mentioned, we are implementing the Towards Sustainable Mining protocols of the Mining Association of Canada at all of our operations. In regards to the International Cyanide Management Institute, we have certified 2 new mines in compliance with the Cyanide Code in 2021. We have now three certified mines, and I expect it to certify three more in 2023.
Regarding reporting frameworks, we have significantly increased our disclosure to include GRI and SASB indicators in our 2021 report. Last year, for the first time, we reported also to CDP and published our Tailings Management Overview Report. Now going to the industry standards. I already mentioned the TSM protocols. We have set the target this year of achieving 75% to Level A of all the indicators by the end of this year. For that, we have conducted self-assessments at all of our operations to identify where the gaps are so we can focus our efforts more efficiently to reach this level. We want to complete 100% of indicators to Level A by the end of next year.
In regards to the Responsible Gold Mining Principles, we are also working to achieve full compliance by 2024. This is following guidance of the World Gold Council that allow a three year period of implementation to the principles. As members of the United Nations Global Compact, we have also conducted an analysis of the sustainable development goals that are most relevant and directly that we can impact more directly with our activities. We are focusing initially our efforts to 4 SDGs that we believe we can have a very positive impact and contribute to the achievement of these global goals. The idea is to once we focus on this, we can be increasing our focus also to other goals. Can we go to the next slide?
I'm gonna turn it over now to Dennis, our Vice President for health, safety, and environment.
Morning, everybody. Probably the obvious principal highlight here is zero fatalities, and we're very proud of our safety performance across the company. I wanna emphasize that the results that you see here, the 3.05 total recordable injury frequency rate and the 0.68 lost time injury frequency rate, they're both per million hours worked, not 200,000, as is normally reported in Canada and in the U.S. Because we're a more global company and because we have more mines elsewhere, we choose the million man-hours to report against. A couple of things in the slide. We've got a couple of very good initiatives that we've started in the last year or so.
One of those has been our monthly incident review, where we have the C-suite, we have senior management, we have management from all sites attending a call that goes through the incident investigations of significant incidents across our company. We're able to really analyze the adequacy of the investigation and ask a lot of questions, and really make sure we get the most out of the investigations in terms of learnings for all of our sites, which has been a very positive thing for us. The other thing is we've introduced an annual safety award. Our first award was our Chairman's Safety Award. It was basically the site that had the best total recordable injury frequency rate across the company.
That's now morphed into not only that award, but into the COO's Award, which is for the most improved total recordable injury frequency rate. The CEO's Award, which is a very exciting award, I think. We have safety leaders from each site nominated to a panel at corporate where the person's selected. We have a winner selected out of the nominations. This year, we had a first, second, and third nominated person. Workers have been given these awards. Yeah, I've met each of those, and it's been treated very very. It's been very exciting to be able to meet these people that are.
The sites are very proud of these people at each site. It's been a very positive thing and been taken very well. Thanks. Now I'm gonna hand over to [Becca] on the public health side. Sorry. I think Christian sort of said everything. I think things are toning down at our sites when it comes to COVID, but we're quite proud of the fact that we're able to maintain the health and safety of our workforce and not lose any days of production due to COVID. We've handled it very successfully, I think. Next slide. Now back to Georgina for the strategy on social engagement development.
Thanks, Dennis. Our strategy for social engagement and development is based on three principles, engagement, participation, and collaboration. These principles are the foundation to create sustained economic development and improve well-being in the regions where we operate. These principles also are the basis for developing all our standards and tools, procedures that our sites have in their engagement with local communities. We now turn to the next slide. We have more than 20 communities at our sites that they consider as being local. These are the communities that are closest to our mines, and we recognize that local employment and procurement opportunities, business opportunities for these communities is of very important relevance and importance for them and for us, of course.
All of our sites support and contribute to improved well-being in these communities, from promoting, you know, programs to promote sports, with health campaigns, cultural events, and also, in productive projects and income-generating programs. Again, employment and business opportunities at the mine are most relevant. We are proud to say that almost 100% of our workforce comes from the country of operations, and more than 80% of our workforce also comes within the state or the province where our mines are located. This is very important for us because, we're promoting and are giving priority to hiring locally. Also, last year, 95% of our procurement spend went to in-country suppliers, and more than 20% to the local municipalities where our mines are located.
All of these contributes to the economic development and well-being of the regions where we operate. If we go to the next slide, human rights has been very important focus for us in 2021. We approved, as already mentioned, our social responsibility and human rights policy. This policy states our commitment to respecting the rights of all people and contributing to improve the quality of life and sustainable development of the areas where we operate. We held last year a training course for our leadership team and also hired an independent consultant to conduct a human rights risk assessment of all of all our operations, including two site-specific assessments, Los Filos, and Aurizona.
The risks that were identified were entered into our enterprise risk management system, so we could monitor and mitigate and avoid any issues or negative impacts on human rights. These assessments also help us to ensure that our actions are not infringing any human rights, and at the same time, identify areas where we can also contribute positively for these areas. The assessments focus on the areas where we can have a greater impact for the right holders. This includes labor and working conditions, community environment and health, community cultural, social, and economic rights, Indigenous Peoples' rights, also land rights and security, and of course, ethical business and practices.
Now, the next steps on this area in 2022, we are developing our human rights due diligence framework so that we can make sure that we have a system in place to regularly identify and mitigate any potential impacts on human rights. Going to the next slide, please, Rhylin. Inclusion and diversity, as mentioned, we are also very committed to it. We're committed to 30% representation of women on the board by 2023. We recognize that diversity. We also recognize that diversity is a wider topic than just gender. It includes also other types of backgrounds. We want our workplaces and our workforce and representatives from the board to management at all levels to be representative of the communities where we operate.
Currently, the percentage of female employees at each of our sites really varies significantly. We have 10% at Mesquite, and then 37% at Greenstone, for example. 14% of our direct employees company-wide are female, while at the Vancouver office, this percentage goes to 35%. We are in our operations in the average that is considered to be the average for the mining industry globally that has been established by the World Bank in a study conducted in 2019 to be between 8%-17%. What we did in 2021 in this regard was to review our hiring processes, and we made sure that we use inclusive language and promote diversity for the candidates.
We focus on removing barriers for candidates from diverse backgrounds to apply to job positions. Also last year, we started participation, and we actually just finished that program. We joined the United Nations Global Compact Target Gender Equality program, where we join other companies in a journey to learn from each other, learn what has worked, to increase diversity in the workplace, and learn from each other. This program is helping us in developing a diversity strategy, company-wide that we are developing this year, 2022. We go now to the next slide. In April of 2021, we acquired 60% interest in the Greenstone project in Ontario.
We are very proud of the work that the team at Greenstone have been doing in building trustful and strong relationships with our indigenous partners there. The project already has long-term relationship agreements in place with four First Nations and the Métis Nation of Ontario as well. They're currently working very well through implementation committees to make sure that all the agreements in place are achieved. We are committed also to ensuring that all the community members are participating and benefiting at every step of project development and then during operations when we start operating the mine.
Right now we're only just over six months through a two-year build, and so far, more than 40% of the contract value has been awarded to indigenous businesses to date, and more than 20 indigenous joint ventures have been created to support project development. We are also working with our indigenous and community partners to run training programs so that community members can get the skills required to obtain jobs for the mine operation phase, because we know that those jobs will last for the whole life of mine, and they create longer-term opportunities either with Equinox Gold and but also with other projects in the region. Actually, if you haven't done so, we have a short video in our website with highlights from the groundbreaking ceremony conducted last year in October.
You can hear there some comments from all of the leaders of each of the indigenous communities with whom we have these agreements. Going to the next slide. From a community engagement perspective, in 2021, we focused our efforts on public health, not only because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also raising awareness to other types of illnesses. We conducted health campaigns, for example, at different sites in the different countries where we operate. We also started increasing our face-to-face interactions as the restrictions of COVID-19 also started to be lifted in the different places where we operate.
We made sure that even though, maybe, the face-to-face engagements were being limited, we made sure that communication was always open, a channel of communication was always open, especially to hear any complaints or concerns from the communities where we operate. In 2021, we received 137 complaints, of which most of the concerns were regarding environmental issues, such as related to water, related to dust, noise, and vibration. At the end of the year, all but one complaint have been addressed and resolved. That one complaint that was still ongoing this year has been addressed already and resolved.
I think that it's important also to mention that we encourage our sites to report all complaints or concerns received by communities, because what matters is that we listen and resolve these concerns. We began standardizing also last year our reporting and feedback so we can better analyze where areas to prioritize our efforts are, and we can minimize any adverse impacts and find areas where we can have most meaningful contributions. Next steps in this year, 2022, we will be implementing or continue working towards the implementation of TSM protocols, where, as I already mentioned, our target is to achieve level A in most of the indicators by the end of this year.
We are also working to develop our Equinox Gold social management standards that will provide a guide to all of our sites to have consistency and that can establish what are our commitments and the minimum that we want to have to guide our performance, and from there, any improvements that we can make also for continuous improvement. Going to the next slide. Of course, Los Filos is a very public. We have very public community issue during 2021, the blockade we had at Los Filos mine. Los Filos is. It's a complex mine site, it's large. We have community agreements and so land agreements and social collaboration agreements with three different communities.
We try to always keep a good balance between or among the three communities in the benefits that we can provide to all three of them. We knew that Los Filos had a history of blockades from the start of its operation in 2007. This year, what happened is that the community, one of the communities and one of the union sections wanted more benefits that exceeded the already agreed in contracts of the benefits that were agreed with the company. It's important to mention that the issues raised in the blockades don't they don't have to do with the mine operation. It's been very clear to our communities and workers that they want the mine to be operating.
What we understand that they want to have more benefits, more employment opportunities to their own people. We need to make sure that we, as mentioned before, that we keep a fair balance to all of these three communities where, with whom we have agreements. We cannot offer benefits or opportunities to one community that would disadvantage another. Throughout these experiences at Los Filos, we have always focused our efforts in building stronger relationships, regaining trust between the company and the communities, and we always have prioritized open and transparent dialogue. We believe that any disagreements can be resolved through dialogue.
For example, last year in November, I think a very important meeting that we had with the three community leaders in the same room with Christian Milau, our CEO, and our Chairman, Ross Beaty, where we could all share experiences and expectations and the will to take the mine forward in a different type of relationship for the years to come. If we go now to the next slide on community development. We do understand that the importance of socioeconomic contributions that mining brings to the communities where we operate. Last year, we contributed more than CAD 40 million in community contributions, direct community contributions that benefited infrastructure, education, sanitation, health.
Also the benefits or economic benefits through wages and salaries that, as I already explained, the vast majority of our workforce are from the communities where we operate. That reached almost CAD 200 million last year. That is in addition to the procurement spend that last year accounted for more than CAD 190 million. All of these contributions stay in the areas where the mines are located, benefiting not only the communities, but states, provinces and the countries where we operate. I am now going to turn it over to Christian to talk about one of our most important project infrastructure community projects of last year.
Yeah. Thanks, Georgina. I did wanna jump in and just talk to this one about the Aurizona village and the water situation there. It's a site that's very close to my heart. It was the first project we were involved in actually here, and it's in the north, northeastern part of Brazil, but the northwestern part of Maranhão State here, where the mine's located. It's a very subsistence farming and fishing area, and we're the major industry there. We're very proud to be a key part of society there. In late March last year, there was an exceptionally heavy rain period. It does rain there during that period of the year, but almost 500 mm of rain happened in 48 hours, which is one in 10,000-year rain event.
Again, we all have to acknowledge that those things are becoming more common. What we ended up with was widespread flooding in the region, which washed out many roads, increased the turbidity in waterways, and impacted local sources of drinking water, which interestingly enough was very similar to what happened here in British Columbia late last year. Water, roads were washed out, turbidity in water and you know real impact on the community here as well in a wider way. Government took the lead here in Vancouver to try and deal with that in British Columbia. We took a very responsible lead, we think, on helping resolve the situation there in Maranhão.
You know, the mine site team, I have to give them credit, they jumped to the situation very quickly, restored road access to the village, delivered bottled drinking water, installed and filled potable water tanks throughout the village. We helped to repair and upgrade, you know, their water treatment facility, which was outdated and not being managed very well and really was not capable of managing that level of change and impact. We offered to work with the community very closely. We continued to deliver bottled water and potable water while we worked on that actual project. We actually delivered, and you can see in the picture there, I actually got to visit and drink the water myself, not too many months ago, and we actually delivered that towards the end of last year, and it's now fully implemented.
Unfortunately, during that period, we did see significant interest on the social media front and some rhetoric online. You know, a lot of it was led towards saying there was a tailings dam failure there, which is clearly inaccurate information. Obviously, we're very closely regulated and managed in terms of tailings dam and all of our impact on the local area. You know, it was really localized flooding of the lagoons and the rivers in the area that impacted the water, and it was nothing to do with tailings dam. I just want that to be very clear. At the end of the day, we opened up and commissioned that new facility. We've done some training with the public authorities, and we passed that back to them.
It is their responsibility to take on managing that site and not our job, but we felt that we could be a good community member and actually participate along the way and provide some of the capital and expertise. We're really proud of this sustainable community investment project, and we think it really will support this project in the long term in an area that needs the investment. I just wanted to say a couple of words on that. Thanks, and I'll pass it back to Dennis in the environment.
Okay. To slide 28. Yeah, I guess we've sort of mentioned some of these highlights, but I'll just go through a couple of things. One thing to mention, we use the Significant Environmental Incident Frequency Rate to measure our performance against. It's very similar to the way you would measure lost time injury frequency rate or, like, a health and safety measure. The reason we do that is because we wanna make the link between what our workforce actually does and environmental incidents. As we expand as a company, then we can use a rate to measure our performance without having to be too disruptive through the year against our KPIs.
Another thing that probably worth mentioning is we have a very prescriptive measure of what significance definition of what significance actually is. It's. You'll see it at the bottom of the page there, that's our definition that we use. I guess anything that's reported or even notified to a government authority would make its way into that definition of significance. We have quite a tight definition of significance. But even with that, we only had 13 of the 126 reported environmental incidents. We encourage reporting of every environmental incident, every spill, everything that's considered an environmental incident, we encourage that reporting. Of the 126, 13 were considered significant. That helped us to achieve our target of.
I think our target was 1.6 for the year, and we came in at 0.68. We did very well when it came to that. This coming year, we're putting together. Well, actually this year, we're putting together our environmental management standards. Much as we've already got a set of health and safety management standards, Georgina mentioned that she's putting together the social management standards for the company, and we're adopting the environmental management standards as well. The next slide. Water management. Our objective really is in line with the traditional reduce, reuse, recycle way of managing water. We try and minimize the amount of water that we actually need to run our process.
As with most mining companies, we reuse most of the water that comes into that process. We're still gathering baseline data around some of our water metrics, so you'll see a lot more water metrics come in the future. I guess one of the other things to mention is that we have. Well, we're sitting in vastly different settings across our company, from extremely dry areas such as at Mesquite and Castle, and where we have a significant negative water balance, and then areas where we have a net positive water balance, such as at Los Filos. We're implementing TSM this year.
TSM encourages the adopters to look beyond their fence line with their water balance and to be a part of a catchment-wide conversation around how to address water-related risks and opportunities. You'll see a lot more activity around that as we start to adopt TSM in the future. Next slide. Waste rock and tailings management. During 2021, we put together our commitments document that you'll be able to find online, the Tailings Management Overview Report. That was our first report we've put out of that nature. It's to address some of the questions and queries from the Church of England letter that went around to all mines regarding tailings. We've put that together. It's a...
I encourage you to have a look at that document. It'll also show you exactly what our commitments are in terms of global standards. The global tailings standard, that's now been adopted by many companies. We're adopting it through TSM first. We're adopting the same way that the Mining Association of Canada has addressed it. We're giving priority to TSM and the Tailings Management Protocol, which is very similarly aligned in many ways. Once we get to the point where we have that fully implemented, then we'll be adopting the remaining parts of the global tailings standard.
I guess another thing to mention is that we have an independent tailings review board for our tailings dam at Aurizona, and it's also in operation at Greenstone as well. For our other sites, we do use third-party inspections and third-party oversight as well. At those two, Aurizona and Greenstone, we have an independent auditor involved. Next slide. Let's start energy and greenhouse. One last slide. No. Energy and greenhouse. Well, I guess the main highlight for last year was the 5% reduction in greenhouse that we actually achieved from our first target that we set in 2021. This year, we're setting a short-term target.
It will probably come in a lot lower than well, maybe lower than 5% as we start to. There's less low-hanging fruit in terms of energy efficiency. We're still going to set a short-term target that will allow us to which will have a real beneficial effect on the operations. Our focus has been towards producing midterm targets and long-term targets to support a net zero target for a future date. You'll be seeing a lot more.
Well, by the end of this year, we will have set our long-term target with established milestones, which we think are very important and really what investors really wanna see, like how you actually wanna get to that net zero, that net zero milestone. Also, by the end of the year, we're looking at having a TCFD report that will go through our climate-related risks and our climate-related financial risks, as well as our climate-related physical risks. Anyway, you'll see more of that before the end of the year. In 2021, we also reported for the first time on CDP. We'll be doing that again this year.
There's been a lot of work done on different projects, and some of those have been looking at advanced studies using solar and wind power and also for all of our projects. We're just trying to get our head around exactly how we're going to achieve a net zero, you know, we're looking at net zero timeline. On the next slide, you'll see a lot of graphs around our GHG emissions on energy consumptions, scope one and two emissions. Our company, as far as our benchmarking, we sit around the average overall when you take all of our sites into account. We sit around the average for the energy inten for the greenhouse intensity.
On a CO₂ per tons emitted, CO₂ tons emitted per ounce, we sit around the average for the sector. On biodiversity and mine closure, I think it's important to say that we have purchased and protected 7,000 hectares of undisturbed land in Brazil. We have permit. Our permit requires us to do that, but it's very much a good conservation project and very positive. We use progressive reclamation across all of our sites, and during the year, we reclaimed 114 hectares of land. In the future, we're adopting TSM and as it's been mentioned several times.
One of the things that actually promotes is looking to get other parties, third parties, such as universities to take part in research, which is a positive contribution to conservation across the area. We've got several cases of that. Well, we've got several partners that we've actually dealt with some of our sites. One of those is around Golden Eagle at Castle. Like we're doing some research around it, as well as several other projects across our company. With that, I'll turn it back to Christian.
Thanks, Dennis. On the last slide, really on slide 34 on our 2022 targets, when we set those at the beginning of the year, they're available on our website, available on our management circular. We commit to those, and then we measure ourselves against them and as Ross joins us at our year-end review. We watch that very carefully, and we manage it very carefully. You know, we're striving to be better every year, and we do look at how we can continue to move towards being, you know, a leader in this space in terms of responsible mining and sustainable development.
You know, we're a fairly young company, and after two significant acquisitions in the last two years during the middle of COVID. You know, maybe we're playing a little bit of catch up here, but I think our disclosure's come a long way in the last two years when you look at our ESG report, and even this call is an inaugural call. We're really proud of, you know, the people and processes we've been able to put in place in a very short period of time with very little interaction personally. We've been doing a lot of it remotely, and we've been able to communicate those objectives, we hope, to you as an investor. You know, we'll continue with our quarterly reporting and of our key metrics on our website, so please keep an eye on that.
We'll continue to add to data and information as we can and as the baseline data comes in over the next year. We'll continue to give ourselves stretch targets. You know, we're always improving. We're not perfect in every area. We know we've got some weaknesses in areas we need to do better in, and we'll continue to focus on those, and we identify those as key risk areas. We're keen to get your feedback, and as Georgina explained, we do reach out for feedback every year to see what are areas of importance in the sector and to you as stakeholders in our business. I do wanna thank the team. You know, it goes all the way down to the people on the ground who actually deliver what we do on a day-to-day basis.
It's been a heck of an effort over a very challenging last two-year period, where we've really created this company of a substantial size. I do wanna conclude by stealing a few words from Ross, which I know he loves to say, but a good company provides its returns to its shareholders, and a great company provides excellent returns for all stakeholders. That is certainly our goal, and I hope you see in our vision and our performance, that's where we're aiming and that where we're heading. I think I'll stop now and open up to questions.
Perfect. Thank you very much. Operator, can you please remind our listeners how to ask a question?
Certainly. Once again, if you are participating through the webcast, you may submit a question in writing by using the text box in the lower left corner of the webcast frame. If you are listening by phone, you may submit your questions in writing by email to ir@equinoxgold.com. I will now hand the meeting back to Rhylin Bailie, who will moderate the Q&A session.
Thank you. Christian, we've got a question about the Aurizona water issue. There still seems to be a misconception that the Aurizona Village does not have access to reliable drinking water. Can you please address that?
Yeah, sure. I think, like I said earlier, there has been some inaccurate information and probably some misleading information online in that, you know, we jumped on that situation to help the community very quickly, number one, in just providing access to water and access to the village very quickly, but also trying to address the long-term solution. We approved, literally within a few days, we approved the whole water system in that. I think Ross and myself actually stepped on the ground there in sorta late last year and basically drank the water from our facility, which was in the process of being finally commissioned and actually handed over to the community. Now it is operating.
It's got much greater capacity, and we actually found some things out as you do when you renovate a system or a home or whatever that, you know, things like pipes and access to sort of, other regions of the village that really weren't getting good access could be improved, and I think we provided that. You know, even in the interim, we were able to provide access to that water. I really do feel strongly that we've done the right thing there, and we've continued to provide that. We've had good feedback from the community leaders and from the locals, which a lot of them actually work for us. We've had a lot of good feedback from them.
Thank you very much. A question about Los Filos. Do you feel you've got the stability there? Have you changed your long-term mine plan as a result of those changes, and sort of what things are you working on that you think will continue to give you stronger relationships going forward?
Yeah, let me start with that, and Georgina or Doug, please jump in if you have any comments to add. You know, as we all know and say, and it's very commonly used clichés, you know, trust is built over time, and it's easily lost. Unfortunately, during that period after we bought it, I'd say the trust level from both sides with communities and us has obviously dropped, and we're in the process of recovery there. We've had, you know, three quarters I think now of sort of operations in a pretty steady state. We do believe that we're on the right path, and things are improving.
You know, we've made some changes, partly to senior personnel and actually putting in place people who have more experience dealing with these specific type of situations with the culture, the language, operating a mine in this region. I think we've made positive strides in that sense, and Georgina was actually very actively involved in resolution there. I think we acknowledge that, you know, we wanna provide as much benefit into communities as possible. The challenge we do have there are three communities. They all want as much of the benefit as possible, and so we play almost a mediator type role, and we have to operate a mine safely and efficiently over time.
I think we've tried our best to be as flexible in providing as many opportunity, jobs, and access to those opportunities as possible to each of those communities without any detriment to the other communities because we tend to have to negotiate on a one-on-one basis between the communities. It was a really great opportunity for Ross and myself to sit in the room literally with the three senior leaders of each community in the same room for the first time in many, many years. I think the common thing that came out of it, as Georgina said, is everyone wants this mine operating long term. It's a huge benefactor to the communities in terms of jobs, employment income, all the social benefits which we provide and the opportunities for long-term other industries to grow around this.
We're also taking on board how can we also play a part in this community by doing things that are not just mining. You know, simple little examples, and again, others please jump in and add, but, you know, doing things around restoration of lands which the communities are, have been asking for. The agave plants are a really important part of the local community, which are non-mining, clearly, and create another almost industry for them. We've been able to help restore some of those. That creates a partnership and some work outside of actually mining, where there has been obviously some conflict over the last year. But I think it's also just the commitment here, and as Ross said. Ross speaks fluent Spanish, and was able to say very clearly to them, we wanna be here for the long term.
We think this is a great place to work and a great deposit, and also some great mining experience and knowledge in the region. Now we have to find a way to work together as partners going forward. There has to be lines drawn at certain points, which we obviously did when we were going through negotiations where we can't disadvantage others, and we have to operate our mine safely and carefully, so we tend to have to draw the line when it encroaches upon our contractors and our underground and our open pit operations where it does compromise safety, health, and other factors that are critical to mining.
Perfect. Thank you. A question about emissions. On slide 32, you talk about your GHG emissions. You talk about Scope 1 and Scope 2. When do you intend to address Scope 3 emissions?
Yeah. There's parts of our business that are actually already reporting some of that. Unfortunately, that's not the case in all parts of the company. We'll probably take the template that's used in Brazil. Well, Brazil has started to report some of those. We'll take that, and we'll. As we develop our energy management standard, we'll be addressing that. I would say within the next 12 months, we start to report some of that metric.
Thank you. A question from Wayne Lam, our Analyst at Royal Bank of Canada. You've talked a bit about carbon pricing in Canada. Have you done any analysis on the, what that impact might have on Greenstone? And do you have any detail on whether the tax will apply on full emissions or just a certain portion of emissions from that mine site?
I mean, let me start with an overall comment on that, and Dennis or Doug, please jump in on any specifics you have. You know, certainly, we do take it into account, and we do see there's a real opportunity there to look at moving to call it greener power and energy sources, but it will take a bit of time. That area of Ontario is opening up, and we see real government support and a focus in Ontario to moving towards those cleaner energy sources over time. We've been working and partnering with the First Nations with our initial energy and inputs, and I think over time, you'll see us moving towards something that's more grid and hydroelectric power oriented, but it will take time.
I don't have a defined timeline for that, but I certainly hope in the next sort of medium term here that we're moving towards that, which will reduce it very significantly. You know, as we've discussed probably on prior calls before, our primary emissions, 80%-90% come from energy into our plant sites and as well into our generally diesel fleets. As we see more and more announcements, I even saw one this morning, everyone's moving towards more efficient plant input energy sources, but also now the trucks are becoming more efficient and moving to clean energy sources. I think those will be our two key target areas.
In Ontario particularly, I think that energy input for our plant site in the midterm, we are gonna work hard with the government to move it across, as most other mines actually in Ontario are, to hydroelectric power.
I guess to support that, we have had an external report on what the cost of a decarbonized economy will have on Equinox generally. Not just in Canada, but in the U.S. and in Brazil and in Mexico as well. As I mentioned during the talk, we are putting together a TCFD related report or compliant report for the end of the year. When we do that, it'll have not just what the costs are, but how we're gonna mitigate those costs in the longer term so that we reduce that risk. We're just working on the ways we're going to reduce that risk at the moment.
I do think it's been a really eye-opening exercise to go through that process for a new young company. You know, potential impacts are tens of millions of dollars in the long term if you don't deal with these emissions and move towards that net zero in a reasonable period of time. That's what's focusing the mind. As Wayne, as you suggest, Canada has been very clear in focus, so that one will be addressed very much in that midterm process. I believe the other countries will follow suit to a certain degree, maybe not to the same extent, but I think this is a global phenomenon that's happening. Anyone who doesn't follow suit will be left behind, and I think companies will address it and move in that direction over the midterm year.
It's sort of a follow-on question to that. You mentioned that you're working with consulting companies to look at how to offset your emissions. Will you be reporting on that? And what kinds of things are you considering, like carbon credits, new technologies?
Yes, we will be reporting on that with that TCFD report. I guess the approach that we've taken is, it's three pillar. The first is to become as energy efficient as you can because obviously you don't wanna bring in renewables to just make wasted energy. That doesn't make any sense. The first part is to become as efficient as we possibly can. As those energy efficiency projects become more and more expensive, then it brings up more of your renewables and other more capital-intensive projects become economically more viable. At the very end of it is the carbon credits. We're keeping our eye on that space.
It's a little gray to us at the moment, but we're doing our research at the moment because we realize at the very end of this, whatever amount of emissions we have, we may have to offset. That's our last resort. To be honest, it's the grayest area at the moment, so we're waiting till the very end before we actually make that decision.
I do think that will be one of the key tools in our toolbox. As Dennis said, that'll be one of the last ones we'll use. There probably will be some residual that we'll have to deal with, and it may be through the credits process. Let us get through our mid to longer term planning, disclose some information and, you know, then we can talk a little more specifically about maybe that residual rump that we need to deal with.
Thank you. Another question from Wayne Lam at RBC. Your flagship Los Filos asset is also among the highest emissions assets in the portfolio. Are there any easy wins that can be made there in terms of reducing emissions? Is there a trade-off between additional capital that you're willing to commit to these initiatives versus the need for community stability?
Los Filos, given that it has three open pits and two underground that feed into the heap leach pad, it ends up being the truck fleet that is the big diesel consumer. We would like to be able to look at alternative trucks in Mexico. It is a bit of a hindrance right now because of the way the government policies prevent us from being able to adopt some of the new technologies for trucks. It's counterintuitive. We would like to see that change and be able to conceive of being able to change to a more efficient truck fleet. In the meantime, we are doing other things in, wherever possible, especially on the leach pad, to be more efficient.
This doesn't relate to GHG reductions, but obviously things where we can be doing the water conservation we possibly can do or looking at alternate ways to generate power. The team at site has been very, very proactive in putting forward lots of concepts or ideas that we're looking into. We have the group here that's also been following on trying to do the initial engineering to see if there's any fruit that can be had through the various concepts at Los Filos. It is a challenge at that site.
Two of the specific areas that I know the team is looking at, they mentioned here in our recent update with them, they're looking at solar power for certain parts of the site and also looking at ways to manage the fleet and reduce consumption and make it more efficient. You know, those are kind of low-hanging fruit that maybe don't solve the bigger problem, but they certainly help along the way in the early days.
Probably worth mentioning, we share experiences from all sites. Just as I sort of mentioned on the health and safety side with those investigations, what we try and get key learnings from everywhere to make sure that we're better managing our sites. Doug's part of an energy and greenhouse working group that we have that has all of the sites, the country heads as a part of that meeting. Yeah, we're always on the lookout for energy efficiency projects at all of our sites that make sense.
One other thing on Los Filos is all of our electric power comes in from a grid that is being fed into by a nearby very large reservoir and hydroelectric facility. The grid also has non-renewable energy coming into it. We can't call it renewable or green energy because it has portions of the power in the national grid of Mexico that come from non-renewable sources as well. It ends up looking worse than it probably really is, given that if you looked at the proportion that's on the overall grid for that region, it would be far greener. We can't do that. Just not allowed.
Perfect. Well, at the moment, we have no further questions. So if you do think of questions that you didn't have time to ask, please do email us, and we'll get in touch with you as soon as we can. I will turn the call over to Christian Milau for closing remarks.
Yeah, thanks, Rhylin, and appreciate everyone taking the time today, just over an hour and for our inaugural call. You know, we'll just continue to improve and focus on providing more information so you can keep an eye on this part of our business because it is an integral part and a pillar of what we're doing. You know, thanks for taking the time today.
Thank you very much. Operator, you can now conclude the call.
Thank you. This concludes today's presentation. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.