The economist specializing in issues of transparency, Jeanette Von Wolfersdorff, addressed the decision of the National Copper Corporation (Codelco) board of directors to advance towards the closure of the Ventanas smelter, located in Quintero, due to contamination episodes. In this regard, the economist pointed out that the company should have shown the risks of the foundry to the community.
“In the case of Codelco, Windows, we see that the company should have applied tools such as human rights due diligence and show its real risks to people around the company, and it has not done so,” Von Wolfersdorff said in conversation. with The Counter at La Clave.
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He added that Codelco “has not quantified and explained its risk to people, as it should have done, and on the contrary, it has disclosed that it has provided support to entrepreneurs, it has shown itself to be very sustainable on its website.”
“We are precisely at a time of rethinking what companies make transparent and how to open up the gaps they have in front of their stressed parties, their stakeholdersthe communities, the employees, the suppliers,” he emphasized.
Von Wolfersdorff also pointed to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), a standard that Codelco uses to publish its sustainability reports.
“Since January 2023, companies have to show gaps and risks to people. If a public company, Codelco, uses the GRI international standard, theoretically it should start showing the health risk for the lungs, the immune system, of his actions,” he said.
“If you don’t, you breach a transparency standard that you use internationally and theoretically you could also be fined here in Chile,” he projected.
Index linked to stakeholders
The executive director for Latin America of the Stakeholders Sustainability Index (Ssindex or Sustainability Index of Interest Groups), rodrigo castroalso present in the interview, precisely referred to the relationship between companies and their stakeholders.
Castro delved into the Ssindex. “He has a complementary look at what companies have been doing at the level of sustainability, which has to do with: the information is no longer reported by the company, but rather the information comes from the stakeholdersof the employees, of the clients, of the suppliers, of the investor communities, and that is current information”, he commented.
“This indicator allows somehow to identify crossed data of stakeholders. There is a first difference with what companies might say,” she emphasized.
In this line, he commented that through the Ssindex, “we make the evaluation, we find different gaps, a score is given”, which goes from 0 to 100. “There we measure the commitment raised from the employees, the clients, the suppliers, the communities, all together, and there is a score at the company level,” he added.
“This information is private, it is delivered to the company in a closed manner, but what we are seeing is that the companies that are part of this indicator communicate it in their reports, they communicate it in their reports, so there is progress in terms of going looking at these scores in light of the improvement,” added Castro.
- See the full interview with Jeannette Von Wolfersdorff and Rodrigo Castro.
