Memo to the SEC on the Proposed Rule on Disclosure of Payments by Resource Extraction Issuers

CCSI strongly supports the transparency of contracts and tax flows. CCSI shares the belief of many stakeholders that transparency is essential to leverage extractive industries for sustainable development and is in the mutual interest of all stakeholders. However, some industry players continue to voice the concern that increased transparency would be harmful for their business. Therefore, CCSI is working to also establish the business case for transparency. In one such case, some industry players have been lobbying against the regulations developed by the Security and Exchange Commission to implement the mandatory disclosure provisions of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act; section 1504 of that act requires all US listed companies to report detailed payments to governments on a project-by-project basis in all countries of operation. To support the SEC’s mandate in implementing the regulations, and to respond to some of the concerns of industry, CCSI identified the publicly listed extractive industry companies that disclose tax payments on a country-by-country basis and showed the correlation of this reporting practice with both higher financial performance and fewer reported incidences of human and environmental rights violations in the communities where they operate. In December 2011, these results were submitted to the US Securities & Exchange Commission to inform the regulatory deliberations of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. As implementation regulations of Section 1504 were still pending as of October 2015, CCSI consulted with the Publish What You Pay Network and a number of investors and submitted a second letter to the US Securities Exchange Commission. Recognizing the SEC’s mandate to protect investors, this letter provides 7 reasons why it is of utmost importance to maintain company-specific, project-level payment disclosure when issuing the new rules of Section 1504 in order to create improved efficiency in the capital markets. In November 2017, CCSI submitted the same argument to the UK government as they reviewed the UK extractive sector transparency law

The Business Case For Transparency

We present a two-part study, the purpose of which is to highlight that new disclosure initiatives such as oil and mineral tax payment disclosure as mandated under the Transparency Amendment and as about to be mandated by the European Union, have a place in the investment world and an impact on investment decisions. The study identifies the listed companies that integrate the principle of disclosure of tax payments on a country-by-country basis into their reporting activity and measures their financial performance as well as their performance with respect to human and environmental protection rights of the communities where they interact. This second type of performance is important from the investors’ point of view since it is intimately related to political risk and the ‘social license to operate’

Leveraging the mining industry’s energy demand to improve host countries’ power infrastructure

The World Bank estimates that African investment needs in infrastructure would cost US$93 billion per year, only half of which is for the power sector. In the same time, the availability of power lies at the core of a mine’s development strategy; mining operators need to make sure that the energy demand of mining operations is met. This is especially the case in remote areas, where mining companies are developing large projects with little or no connectivity to national grids and very limited options for electricity supply. To address these energy problems, the mining industry has adopted different solutions depending on the power situation of the country, the projects’ energy demand, and the projects’ distance from the grid: When sourcing from the grid is too expensive or when there is no grid, industry finances and builds its own power generation facilities or sources from a third-party that is a private power generator. When sourcing from the grid is less expensive than own generation, industry either sources from the grid or finances/co-finances the upgrade of the power assets under various arrangements with the public utility. For a mining company, the goal is to maximize cost-savings. For a host country, the challenge is to maximize welfare gains by leveraging any investment in power infrastructure development for the electrification needs of the country. This could be through connecting the mine to the grid and incentivizing the company to produce extra capacity to sell to the public utility in order to increase supply and reduce the electricity cost, or by requiring that the privately-financed network is open to third-party access, so that towns and populations between the mine and the grid benefit from the privately financed distribution lines as well. Both, cost savings and welfare gains can be met simultaneously if sound regulations and efficient coordination mechanisms are in place. Without appropriate regulation, the opportunity for the country will be missed. Without appropriate coordination mechanisms within the mining industry or between the industry and the government, scale economies will be lost. Therefore to take advantage of the opportunity of the investments of the mining industry in power infrastructure, and make sure that the country benefits from those investments, an appropriate planning, regulatory and commercial framework is needed. If power assets are leveraged and designed to contribute to the development of public infrastructure at the national, regional or community levels, the incremental capital cost of building additional capacity could be reduced and the economic and social spillover effects can extend far beyond the mining sector. The purpose of this working paper is to distill good practice principles observed in power infrastructure development leveraging the mining industry’s energy demand around the world, informed by expert opinion

Shared-Use Infrastructure: A Prickly Partnership Takes Root

Only about 30% of Africa has access to electricity, and transport costs in Africa are among the highest in the world. For the World Bank, the annual funding gap for infrastructure investment in Africa is US $31 billion. This gap however can be filled if the investments of natural resource concessionaires are leveraged and not planned in an enclave model. In resource-rich but infrastructure-poor Africa, natural resource concessionaires have traditionally developed railways, ports and power plants to serve their own needs. Africa has therefore often missed the opportunity of coordinating those large investments with national infrastructure planning and has failed to promote potential synergies and shared use of the privately developed infrastructure

Paper on the Business Case for Transparency

CCSI strongly supports the transparency of contracts and tax flows. CCSI shares the belief of many stakeholders that transparency is essential to leverage extractive industries for sustainable development and is in the mutual interest of all stakeholders. However, some industry players continue to voice the concern that increased transparency would be harmful for their business. Therefore, CCSI is working to also establish the business case for transparency. In one such case, some industry players have been lobbying against the regulations developed by the Security and Exchange Commission to implement the mandatory disclosure provisions of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act; section 1504 of that act requires all US listed companies to report detailed payments to governments on a project-by-project basis in all countries of operation. To support the SEC’s mandate in implementing the regulations, and to respond to some of the concerns of industry, CCSI identified the publicly listed extractive industry companies that disclose tax payments on a country-by-country basis and showed the correlation of this reporting practice with both higher financial performance and fewer reported incidences of human and environmental rights violations in the communities where they operate. This paper presents the complete findings of the analysis

Global Value Chains and Resource Corridors: The Nexus is Regional Integration

To be more involved in the global value chains, sub-Saharan African countries should intensify their regional integration efforts. A first step in this direction can be implementing cross-border resource-based development corridors

Leveraging Extractive Industry Infrastructure Investments for Broad Economic Development: Regulatory, Commercial and Operational Models for Railways and Ports

The initial phase of the Leveraging Mining-Related Infrastructure Investments for Development project consisted of a worldwide survey of regulatory, commercial and operating case studies of shared use of mining-related infrastructure. This Policy Paper delivers the findings for mineral railways and ports

The Renewable Power of the Mine

Access to affordable and reliable energy is key for the mining sector and with rising demand for minerals and falling ore grades, energy demand is estimated to increase by 36% by 2035. Today, energy produced and procured by mining companies is mostly fossil fuel based. This will have to change if the sector is to contribute to the decarbonization of the world economy, needed for countries to meet the target adopted at the Paris Agreement of keeping global temperatures from rising more than 1.5-2 degrees Celsius. At the same time, the costs of solar, wind and battery storage systems have been falling at an unprecedented scale, which has encouraged an increasing number of mining companies to test these technologies at their mine sites. The Renewable Power of the Mine report, launched at the Energy and Mines World Congress in Toronto and prepared with the support from the German Cooperation, is the most comprehensive study to date on how the sector has been integrating renewables in their mining operations, the roadblocks that still exist, and the future trends that are likely to further drive the roll-out of renewables to supply electricity to mine sites. 38 case studies are included to highlight practical examples and lessons learned. Recommendations to address the outstanding roadblocks are included for governments, mining companies, independent power producers and donors

Leveraging Paraguay’s Hydropower for Sustainable Economic Development

While internationally Paraguay is known for being the largest hydropower exporter in the world, the domestic economy suffers from regular outages and high system losses. The country is largely dependent on agricultural production, which has led to volatile economic performances in the past resulting from climatic circumstances and commodity price fluctuations. To address these two key policy challenges, the Government of Paraguay has approached The Earth Institute to: 1) explore the potential of a climate risk management system and sustainable agriculture activities to mitigate environmental vulnerability and 2) develop a high-level strategic plan to use Paraguay’s vast hydropower resources for sustainable economic development and the diversification of its economy. Together with the Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development, the CCSI has drafted this report, which: outlines the current challenges faced by the electricity sector and recommends how these could be addressed provides suggestions for how Paraguay could use its excess electricity to diversify its economy and reduce its fossil fuel dependency, and analyzes past revenue streams from electricity exports, suggests ways to maximising future export revenues and provides management system tools that could be considered to allocate these revenues efficiently in the future

Managing the Public Trust: How to Make Natural Resource Funds Work for Citizens

Given their collective size – approximately $3.5 trillion in assets as of end-2013 and growing – and concerns about the motivations of their government owners, much has been written on natural resource funds (NRFs), their investments and global influence. However their impacts on governance and public financial accountability at home have received far less attention. On the one hand, these funds can be used to serve the public interest, for example by covering budget deficits when resource revenues decline, saving for future generations, or helping to mitigate Dutch Disease through fiscal sterilization. On the other hand, they can undermine public financial management and be sources of patronage and nepotism. The Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) and the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) have conducted a world-wide survey of NRFs looking at their management, investments, transparency, and accountability to the public, as well as the fiscal rules that govern them. This project seeks to foster cross-country experience-sharing on fund governance. Policy briefs, the NRF profiles and the webpage have been designed to provide government officials, policymakers, researchers and citizens with information to better understand NRF governance and in particular to equip policymakers with the necessary background to set up funds or reform existing ones. The NRF profiles research methodology draws on a number of resources for its analytical framework, including Edwin Truman’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Scoreboard and NRGI’s Toolkit for Assessing Oil, Gas and Mineral Revenue Management. Each profile is the product of in-depth study of the laws, regulations and policies governing one or a set of funds in a given country, province or state. Primary sources were used when available and all profiles were peer-reviewed by sovereign wealth fund experts, based in-country where possible. This research was directed by Andrew Bauer, economic analyst with NRGI, and Perrine Toledano, Economics and Policy Researcher; Head: Extractive Industries Focus with CCSI