Project Info

Dynamic Indicators for Assessing Mining’s Contributions to Sustainability

Nicole Smith | nmsmith@mines.edu

The goal of this project is to identify a dynamic suite of indicators that can be used to quantify mining’s contributions to sustainable development. This project will take into account the temporal and spatial variation of mining operations and their impacts on communities and other stakeholders. The data to inform the set of indicators will be identified through a bottom up approach drawing from ethnographic data and a top down approach drawing from open source data sets, the academic literature, and company case studies and reports.

More Information

Following is an abstract of paper being presented at an upcoming conference. This paper will outline the framework for identifying the indicators and we will continue to refine this framework and begin to population it with indicators taken from open source data, company reports, academic literature, industry best practice documents, and ethnographic data:

A Conceptual Framework for Selecting Dynamic Indicators for evaluating mining’s contributions to sustainable development
Nicole Smith and Sebnem Duzgun, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, USA

In the past 25 years, the mining industry has embraced the concept of sustainability, as evidenced by glossy company reports that highlight the sustainability of their operations and their contributions to sustainable development. Though not without critique, the mining industry is making concerted efforts to measure their outcomes in accordance with global and industry sustainability targets, yet approaches to indicator-based sustainability assessment are far from standard. This prohibits objective comparisons of mining companies’ sustainability performance globally. Moreover, it is difficult to evaluate a mining company’s performance across their operations because of the varied spatial and temporal scales at which mining operations take place in a given portfolio. At the temporal scale, there are significant operational differences between the stages of early mining, routine mining, and pre-closure mining operations. At the spatial scale, there is significant variation due to the adopted mining method, the size of the operation, the characteristics of the ore body, and the geological and geographical settings. In addition, the spatial and temporal scales of mining operations are shaped by and influence the social, political and environmental settings in which they take place. The spatio-temporal variability of indicators is also controlled by the technological developments, where the nature of the mining operation evolves throughout the overall mine life.

In this paper, we argue that it is necessary to identify dynamic indicators that capture the spatio-temporal scale of the mining operation and can be applied across different scales to assess a mining company’s contributions to sustainable development. A preliminary survey of 31 mining industry professionals, conducted by the authors, indicates that among the respondents, 84% (19 out of 31) of them indicated that they measure sustainability. There are still a significant percentage of organizations, which do not measure sustainability. Also, 61 % of the surveyed professionals use indicators for measuring sustainability, where indicators are selected in various ways. However, the selection of indicators is still fragmented. Almost half of the survey respondents prefer sector standards outlined in international reporting frameworks (47%), and a considerable percent of organizations determine indicators based on company specific guidelines. Based on this preliminary survey data, this paper justifies the need for standard, indicator-based sustainability assessments and proposes a conceptual framework for identifying indicators to measure the contributions of mining companies to sustainable development. The proposed conceptual indicator selection schema considers the dynamic nature of mining, which is subject to spatio-temporal changes, so that the indicators selected for sustainability assessment can be continuously updated throughout the mine life, rather than remain constant. We conclude that although the temporal and spatial extent of mining operations vary greatly, it is possible to identify dynamic sector-wide indicator selection strategies.

Grand Engineering Challenge: Not applicable