CFO, World Gold Council
Transcript
We work very closely with our members, the world’s largest gold producers, and I know that one of the things they take very seriously is their commitment to mine responsibly, thinking about safety, health, the environment and local communities. It is a very challenging environment making sure that gold-mining delivers value to all stakeholders and something that our members take very seriously.
Responsible sourcing is a really important issue globally. It is important across different sectors and it is important in the gold industry. The World Gold Council, representing gold producers, and the LBMA, who maintain the Good Delivery List, both play critical roles. Working hand-in-hand and ensuring that the integration and the alignment between producers and refiners is as seamless as it can be will help provide confidence, trust,integrity to investors and consumers so that they know that the gold they are receiving has been responsibly mined and responsibly refined, and that they can buy it in confidence.
I think that the gold industry takes its responsibility as being a good steward for the earth very seriously. Climate change is an increasingly important area of interest to investors and consumers. Demonstrating how the gold industry is engaged in helping address climate-change challenges is a real area of future work for the entirety of the gold industry across the value chain.
One of the areas that we are working on is helping to understand how you measure greenhouse-gas emissions coming out of the industry, and using that as a base line to then be able to measure the progress in reducing that. There are lots of opportunities. If you think about where many goldmines are situated and if you look at the use of renewable energy, such as solar or hydro, there are big opportunities to move to those power sources. That has the potential to reduce emissions. Furthermore, gold itself has a really important role to play in helping to tackle some of the challenges of converting CO2 into usable fuel. Gold in nanoparticulate form acts as catalyst, are some really exciting developments there that I think also speak to the role that the gold industry can play in addressing the climate-change challenge.
