A significant portion of Rio Tinto PLC (LSE:RIO) shareholders voted against the company's climate 'action plan' but the company won the vote and has proposed no changes.
The resolution on the mining giant's climate plan saw 172.9mln shareholders in opposition, or 15.7% of the total votes, with 84% of the votes in favour.
"The Climate Action Plan puts the low-carbon transition at the heart of Rio Tinto's business strategy: combining investments in commodities that enable the energy transition with actions to decarbonise the company's operations and value chains," the company said in a statement on Thursday morning.
After 99% of investors last year voted in favour of a resolution calling for Paris-aligned emission reduction targets, the company significantly improved its targets to reduce scope 1 and 2 emissions in October.
However, shareholder activists, including Market Forces, have noted that Rio’s scope 3 emissions – mostly comprised of those generated when Rio’s iron ore is processed into steel – dwarfed the company’s operational emissions and were even larger than Australia’s annual national emissions.
At its AGM in Melbourne earlier, Rio’s board of directors was asked how can shareholders and the public determine whether Rio is living up to its climate rhetoric, or lying.
Outgoing chair Simon Thompson repeated Rio’s long-held position that it cannot set scope 3 targets because it can’t control the emissions of its customers, saying “it doesn’t seem appropriate to me to be setting targets unless you have influence and the ability to deliver against those targets”.
But Thompson said the FTSE 100-listed group is working with customers to help design the technology, and supply the products, that will enable decarbonisation.
"If Rio believes it has no influence, why is the company bothering with this work at all? And if it believes this work can deliver decarbonisation results, then why can’t the company anchor the ambition and intent of that work with customers to quantifiable targets?" questioned Market Forces.