Yamana Gold makes it into social index

The Canadian mining company Yamana Gold was brought in to the Jantzi Social Index last month on the grounds of its performance on corporate responsibility issues.

Jantzi Research, which runs the index, said Yamana Gold’s environmental, social and governance performance is now ‘relatively strong among its peers’ and that its environmental, health and safety management systems are ‘above average’.

It praised the company for signing the International Cyanide Management Code, a voluntary programme for the responsible management of cyanide in gold mining, and for being one of the few Canadian mining companies with clear targets for reducing waste generation and water and energy consumption.

The Jantzi Social Index, consisting of 60 listed Canadian companies, was started in 2000 by Dow Jones Indexes and Montreal-based State Street Global Advisers. It is used as the basis of a number of SRI portfolios.

Yamana Gold’s chance to enter the index arose when a previous constituent, Nortel Networks, went bankrupt last month.