Our industry and our association confronted these issues fairly head-on about five, six, seven years ago. There were a number of accidents and so on internationally that didn't reflect positively on the industry.
We introduced at that time something called Towards Sustainable Mining, and we certainly have a lot of information, which we include in our annual report, that we could provide to you on that.
The TSM initiative is a mandatory requirement for our members. They have to adhere to the principles laid out in it and they have to provide information every year against the criteria in TSM. As of last year, they also have to have independent verification of that information. That independent verification is typically done by accounting firms, engineering firms, and so on. The criteria in those areas include energy, greenhouse gas management, tailings management, and emergency preparedness. It's a living initiative. We are now developing new protocols in areas to do with mine closures and community consultation. So these are important areas, and companies have to report against those areas each year.
As I mentioned, we try to make this initiative known internationally in the dialogue we have, for example, with the ICMM, which is the global equivalent of our association. So we're trying to encourage these organizations to look at TSM and consider to what extent it could be applied globally. Over the next few months we will have to think about and have discussion with our board on the extent to which TSM should be applied to the international operations of companies.
I should say that we also have a community of interest advisory panel that provides advice on the TSM initiative. It includes representatives from aboriginal groups, environmental groups, the Sierra Club, and so on, and some mining people as well. That provides an outside check on community interests.
That's our central initiative towards sustainable mining, and we have a significant communications plan associated with it. It's never easy to get these messages out. I think there's always a preference for the more negative stories, but there's certainly a very aggressive effort on our part and on the part of our companies to make progress in these areas.
It's called Towards Sustainable Mining because we're not there. There's always room for improvement. There's always room to move towards more sustainable practices. And certainly those are the principles that are laid out in TSM.