It’s our responsibility. From our origins in 1914 as a Western Australian farmers’ cooperative, Wesfarmers has grown into one of Australia’s largest publicly-listed companies. This, combined with our diverse portfolio of businesses, confers a significant responsibility on us to get our sustainability efforts right. This is a responsibility not only towards our employees and shareholders, but also our customers, our suppliers, our communities and our environment.
Wesfarmers’ objective is to provide a satisfactory return to our shareholders. We believe to do this effectively our businesses need to focus on three areas to ensure we remain a sustainable business: engaging our stakeholders; looking after our environment; and driving our performance.
In this report, each of our businesses has set out the most significant material issues influencing their operations. At a Group level, our material issues are:
For the first time we are reporting on our environmental performance in both absolute and relative terms. This allows us a better measure of progress towards sustainable business operations.
The front section of this report is structured around these key focus areas, and is designed to give you an overview of the Group’s challenges, initiatives and outcomes over the past year. However, not all of the challenges facing our businesses are common across the Group, and our business units also report on specific issues unique to their situation and operations.
Reporting openly and transparently on a large number of key outcomes allows us to track our progress, and publicly acknowledge our performance. However, we are focused on operating our businesses for the long term without the distraction of relatively short-term forecasts.
We set very few public targets, preferring to be judged on our performance, although each business has relevant internal targets that reflect its business operations and plans.
We have also included some broad metrics to describe both the Group and business unit progress over time in the areas of greenhouse emissions, energy and water use, occupational safety information, as well as community contributions.
Our performance in these areas is set out below and the performance of each of our businesses can be found in the Scorecard section.
