Biodiversity Policy

We operate in a manner that aims to minimize our environmental impacts and promote sustainable land use. We know that our activities can affect biodiversity values within land, marine and freshwater ecosystems, as well as the services that natural systems provide for our host communities.

To protect these values and services, we apply the mitigation hierarchy of avoidance, minimization, mitigation through restoration, and offsets during all lifecycle stages of our operations. We are also working toward the goal of no net loss of biodiversity for new sites and major expansion projects.

We are committed to meeting international standards in biodiversity protection, including alignment with the International Council on Mining and Metal´s Mining Principles. We respect legally designated protected areas, such as national parks and nature reserves, where strict nature conservation is the management objective. We also have committed to not explore, mine or operate in World Heritage sites.

Our approach identifies risks to, and opportunities for, biodiversity, such as the presence of listed threatened species in the regions where we operate. We manage these risks by developing an action plan that sets out clear and measurable targets or indicators against which Alcoa and our stakeholders can assess their effectiveness. We believe in science-based solutions and form research partnerships to both better understand potential impacts and inform management practices.

We undertake progressive rehabilitation of our mines to approved performance criteria, recognizing that ecosystem restoration plays a key role in mitigating unavoidable biodiversity impacts. We are proud of our mine restoration efforts, which have received global recognition as leading practices. Our progressive mine rehabilitation contributes to collective efforts to halt deforestation globally by restoring forest ecosystems to all forested areas disturbed by our mine operations, where this is the objective agreed with stakeholders.

We report on land management and rehabilitation performance in our annual Sustainability Report.

Additionally, we strive in all circumstances to implement the Alcoa Biodiversity policy in our non-operated joint ventures through influencing our joint venture partners.

(December 2021)