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Climate change research and activities in the mining and exploration industry typically focus on what can be done to reduce mining’s impact on climate change. Such efforts are aimed at the ‘effect of mining on climate change’, rather than the ‘effect of climate change on mining’.
Climatically imposed impacts and how the industry might adapt to redu...
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... Such strategies should encompass large and established firms and smaller and newer organizations that may lack the resources for costly initiatives [6]. The mine production stage (from pre-mine planning through planning and development, production, postproduction and closure, and post-mining) is most at risk from climate change [8]. Figure 4 explored the effects of significant weather events and climatic variations on a general mining process. ...
... The mine production stage (from pre-mine planning through planning and development, production, postproduction and closure, and post-mining) is most at risk from climate change [8]. Figure 4 explored the effects of significant weather events and climatic variations on a general mining process. These effects could be impacted directly or indirectly as follows [6,8]: ...
Mining is becoming increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change (CC). The consequences of changing weather patterns, such as extreme weather events that can damage equipment, infrastructure, mining facilities, and operation interruption, are the source of the vulnerability. The new demand initiated by governments and international agreements put extra pressure on mining industries to update their policies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and adapt to CC, such as carbon pricing systems, renewable energy, and sustainable development. Most mining and exploration industries focus on reducing mining’s impact and climate mitigation on CC rather than adapting to extreme weather events. Therefore, it is important to study and investigate the impacts of CC on the mining sector. This paper aims to study the challenges and strategies for adapting and mitigating CC impacts on mining using a systematic literature review (SLR). These results showed that most of the proposed models and strategies in the mining field are in the conceptual phase, and fewer are practical models.
... Furthermore, the perceived effect of local changes on the operational activities as identified by respondents coupled with the increasing interest of TCFD member mining companies to integrate climate related-risk reflect the susceptibility of the industry to climate change impact. Literature from other regions including China (Sun et al. 2020), Peru (Gonzalez et al. 2019), Chile (Odell et al. 2018), Canada (Ford et al. , 2011Pearce et al. 2010) and Australia (Hodgkinson et al. 2010(Hodgkinson et al. , 2014 corroborate these findings from the Ghanaian context. Hence, mining operations in southwestern Ghana need to adapt to the impact of changing local climatic conditions to coexist. ...
The mining industry is susceptible to the effects of local climatic changes just as the surrounding socioecological systems are exposed to both mining and changing climate impacts. Adaptation deficit in mining is a worldwide problem but given the double exposure of surrounding systems, which has emergent outcomes on the industry, operations must adapt to coexist with surrounding rural communities. To understand this susceptibility, the study employed mixed methods to assess the implications of local climatic changes on mining sustainability as perceived among Ghanaian operations through the lens of the corporate adaptation process framework. The results indicate that operational workers are aware of increasing variability in the climatic patterns across southwestern Ghana, citing changes in the start/end of the rain season, torrential rain, prolonged dry season, and a general increase in temperature. The effects of these changing patterns, which affect mining activities, are diverse, including mine water management, safety, and occupational health issues as well as production planning opportunities. Workers ranked high the need to involve stakeholders such as the state-appointed regulators and Ghana Chamber of Mines as key strategies to enjoin adaptation to changing climate at operational sites. In addition, workers perceived the impact on regulatory and economic sustainability performances as major factors determining the industry’s perception and willingness to adapt. The study highlights pertinent issues useful for informed policy decision-making in the strive towards attaining sustainable development goals, especially Goal 13, which calls for active collaboration between business and society.
... So far similar research was carried out mostly in Canada and Australia, due to the specifics of the geographical location and mining activities in these areas (Pearce et al., 2009;Pearce et al., 2011;Hodgkinson, 2010;OCCIAR, 2017). There is an increasing need to carry out this research in Europe, where climate change, especially extreme weather phenomena, can have complex impacts on the mining sector. ...
The paper presents an overview of hazardous events in mining in Poland that were related to extreme weather phenomena. The needs and recommended actions in the scope of mitigating the impact of future climate change on mining in all stages of its functioning were also indicated. The presented analyses and conclusions are the results of the first activities in the TEXMIN project: The impact of extreme we-ather events on mining activities, identifying the most important factors resulting from climate change impact on mining.
... Since our interest lies in adaptation as a conceptual category, we targeted scholarly journals and excluded other sources, but acknowledge that relevant material is also published in books (e.g., Carlson et al., 2016;Newton et al., 2005;Sharma, 2017;Taylor, 2015) and as reports, such as in Canada (e.g., Duerden et al., 2014;Pearce et al., 2009) and Australia (e.g., Hodgkinson et al., 2010;Maru et al., 2012;Mason & Giurco, 2013). We also concentrated our review on sources in English, excluding studies published in Spanish (e.g., Navarro, 2017;Seoane et al., 2013), French (e.g. ...
Non-technical summary
Mining regions are affected by climate change. Supplies of energy and water are required, and operations become hazardous during adverse weather events. Adapting to climate change takes three forms: incrementally improving the resilience of mining operations; transitioning to more inclusive governance through institutional and policy innovations; and more profound transformations that shift the balance of power, including profit-sharing, localized control or cessation of mining entirely. Clarifying adaptation pathways helps to identify priorities and inform policies for a fairer and more sustainable future for mining and the regions where it takes place.
... All the above-described negative manifestations of climate change on the mining industry call for a prompt implementation of adaptation strategies [7][8][9][10][11]17,18,26,32,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42] and the development of a practical tool for the assessment of climate change-related economic risks that the extractive companies are facing [5,43]. Specifically, the World Gold Council [43] proposes, as a future area of work, the development of a tool to support the investment community in the context of climate change, provided that risk management is a very useful framework for supporting climate-related decision making [12]. ...
... The development, extraction, and closure works of surface and underground mining, with mineral processing activities included (apart from smelting), are examined as directly affected by climate-related hazards [91]. According to Hodgkinson et al. [38], production, post-production, and reclamation are the most affected among the five mine lifecycle stages. Focusing on those two stages through a systems-theory lens, mining works could be seen as a coordinated set of five interacting mining subsystems, as shown in Table 1. ...
... Each SIS node is composed of nine classes, the name and values of which for the calculations on CPTs are presented in Table 4. These classes were set after reviewing publicly available past climate change impacts and extreme weather-related disasters in mining companies in Australia and Canada [8][9][10]16,30,32,38,69,127]. The third row represents the group of "Partial Risk" nodes for the subsystem that is directly influenced by the "parent" nodes (third cause-effect relationship). ...
Changing climate conditions affect mining operations all over the world, but so far, the mining sector has focused primarily on mitigation actions. Nowadays, there exists increasing recognition of the need for planned adaptation actions. To this end, the development of a practical tool for the assessment of climate change-related risks to support the mining community is deemed necessary. In this study, a comprehensive framework is proposed for climate change multi-risk assessment at the local level customized for the needs of the mining industry. The framework estimates the climate change risks in economic terms by modeling the main activities that a mining company performs, in a probabilistic model, using Bayes’ theorem. The model permits incorporating inherent uncertainty via fuzzy logic and is implemented in two versatile ways: as a discrete Bayesian network or as a conditional linear Gaussian network. This innovative quantitative methodology produces probabilistic outcomes in monetary values estimated either as percentage of annual loss revenue or net loss/gains value. Finally, the proposed framework is the first multi-risk methodology in the mining context that considers all the relevant hazards caused by climate change extreme weather events, which offers a tool for selecting the most cost-effective action among various adaptation strategies.
... Following along that seminal work, Ford et al. (2010Ford et al. ( , 2011 continued exploring perceptions of climate change impacts and extreme weather events of concern among mining executives and operators, respectively. Other countries worth noting where relevant research on the impact of extreme weather events on mining emerged early in the decade are Australia (Hodgkinson et al. 2010;Loechel 2012) and Greece (Damigos 2012). ...
The impact that climate change may play in the future sustainability of mining projects has become increasingly important for the mining industry and its stakeholders. The most significant areas of concern are mine infrastructure, supply chains, health and safety conditions, environmental management, community relations and exploration. This is particularly relevant to mining in a country as climatically vulnerable as Peru. This study focuses on the identification of mining regions and main commodities in Peru that are potentially vulnerable to future extreme rainfall events associated with climate change. From a mine design and planning perspective, this study is a first step to illustrate the importance of considering the impacts of different climatic scenarios on mining in Peru. Based on HadGEM2-ES global climate model projections, mining regions across Peru were clustered into “super-regions” with differing potentials of extreme rainfall events during the next three decades. Five indices for precipitation extremes were used, and their variations between 1971–2000 and 2015–2034 were computed. Current and future metallic mining projects expected to take place across Peru in the next 30 years were retrieved from a mining database and subsequently exported into a geographical information systems software to represent their location and interpolate the variation for each precipitation extreme index. The results of this study point out at a decreasing trend in rainfall extremes intensity and frequency in regions of southern Peru. For copper projects located in these regions, a decrease in rainfall events could also imply an eventual decrease in total precipitation and consequently a deficit in water availability during the next three decades. Mining regions in central Peru, with significant number of zinc projects, are likely to experience a marked increase in overall annual precipitation, average daily precipitation intensity, consecutive days of precipitation and number of heavy precipitation days. At a lesser extent than in central Peru, gold projects in northern Peru are also likely to experience an overall increase in precipitation extremes. The approach used for this research could be extended to other mining regions around the world with extreme weather events.
... Importantly, if the extreme events are no longer considered to be unexpected, due to climate change forecasting, a mine may need to seek costly options from the market to ensure deliveries and protect their reputation (Hodgkinson et al., 2014a). The sectors will need to address adaptation needs to reduce direct and indirect risks and interruptions caused by climate related events across the supply and value chains (Peace et al., 2013;Hodgkinson et al., 2010), referred to as climate adaptation. Previous work found that the adapted operations that are better able to survive extreme weather events would have a competitive advantage (Loechel et al., 2013a(Loechel et al., , 2013bHodgkinson et al., 2014b) if they have developed adaptation strategies and contingency plans to reroute supply and delivery transportation (Hodgkinson et al., 2016). ...
To avoid passing the Paris Agreement's proposed 1.5–2 °C global temperature rise and achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) to reduce poverty, a rapid and sizeable investment in decarbonisation of energy systems, infrastructure and the built environment is needed. Many low-carbon sustainable technologies are more metal-intensive than current high carbon equivalents. Analysis of the increased demands of the transition to the low-carbon economy shows it could lead to the next mining and metals boom increasing metals demand by up to 10-fold by 2050. This major opportunity for the sectors will occur in tandem with additional climate change challenges. The industries will need to increase resilience to extreme events. Declining ore grades require greater energy input for extraction and processing so new methods to avoid associated emissions are required. While oil, gas and coal demand for energy consumption is projected to fall, non-fuel use of those resources will continue to have low-carbon alternative uses. Importantly, adaptation and mitigation opportunities have co-benefits. Profitable opportunities exist for the resource sectors to contribute to meeting the Paris Agreement and UN SDGs. A roadmap is presented that provides a synthesis of adaptation and mitigation strategies towards a climate-smart mining and recycling (CSM&R) strategy.
... Three years on, in 2016, some mining companies have accepted climate change as being a significant risk to their operations (Rio Tinto, 2015;. This suggests that proactive adaptation measures may be necessary in order to ensure business continuity in the light of climate change (Hodgkinson et al., 2010;BSR, 2011) within mine operations plans. Without climate change adaption strategies in place, production may be adversely affected, impacting on the world uranium supply chain. ...
Australia holds 31% of the global uranium resources and currently supplies 12% of the worldwide market. Based on the expected increase in global energy consumption, the demand for uranium is projected to increase, and Australia is well positioned to ensure it remains a significant supplier in the market. However, due to future climate change, the local uranium industry may be impacted as more intense and more frequent extreme weather events are expected, leading to potential disruption to operations and damage to mining infrastructure. Therefore, Australia’s reputation as a reliable industry supplier may be at risk in the future. This paper conducts a review of the vulnerability of the Australian uranium industry to climate related impacts, based on surveys conducted around currently operating uranium mines. Operational disruptions, loss of revenue and increased costs have all been reported as existing impacts by major climatic events. Survey respondents identified tailings/waste storage facilities, ore extraction, processing, transport within the mine site and maintenance activities as the most affected. Through this research, critical aspects to improve the adaptive capacity of the industry have been revealed.
... The importance of rainfall variability including extreme rainfall patterns and below average rainfall has been highlighted in many research studies on ecosystem rehabilitation [4,19,20]. As plants are vulnerable to plant available water, identifying droughts and their characteristics play a critical role in ecosystem rehabilitation [21]. ...
Droughts are one of the most devastating natural hazards, often causing severe economic and environmental damage. Across Eastern Australia climate is highly variable and frequent floods and droughts affect large areas over prolonged periods of time. Understanding the variations and trends in these weather extremes is critical for ecologists to assess the adequacy of management plans for anthropogenically affected landscapes such as agricultural or post-mining land, where water often plays a critical role for ecosystem persistence. In this study we use a new approach developed as a management and/or risk assessment tool for degraded land rehabilitation to quantify periods of water deficit using the severity-duration-frequency (SDF) of rainfall, known as design droughts. This approach is based on the intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) design rainfall concept used by engineers for designing hydrological infrastructure. This study focuses on analysing drought events of four selected locations (Cairns, Melbourne, Wagga Wagga, Quilpie) across Eastern Australia using the Reconnaissance Drought Index (RDI). We used monthly total rainfall and evaporation data of the past 40 years (1972-2013) to identify drought events. We categorised the drought events according to their severity and duration and analysed separately the historic time series as two parts of 20 years (1972-1992 and 1993-2013). We calculated the recurrence intervals of droughts to assess trends in the occurrence of drought events. Results show that the recurrence intervals of Melbourne and Quilpie barely changed over time, while the drought recurrence intervals decreased in Wagga Wagga and Cairns. These findings have critical implications for any rehabilitation and management plans for post-mining and agricultural land.
... Across eastern Australia, current post-mining land rehabilitation strategies often do not incorporate site-specific rainfall and drought metrics other than the average annual rainfall depth . However, regionally extreme rainfall patterns, including both intense rainfall events such as storms or cyclones and prolonged periods of water deficit (droughts), play a critical role in identifying windows of opportunity and/or challenge to the rehabilitation of earlyestablishment ecosystems (Hinz et al., 2006;Hodgkinson et al., 2010). Furthermore, Audet et al. (2013) suggested that short and long-term ecosystem rehabilitation sensitivity to climate can be effectively determined by the seasonality, regularity, and intensity of weather, combined with both median and standard deviation of periods. ...
Eastern Australia has considerable mineral and energy resources, with areas of high biodiversity value co-occurring over a broad range of agro-climatic environments. Lack of water is the primary abiotic stressor for (agro)ecosystems in many parts of eastern Australia. In the context of mined land rehabilitation quantifying the severity–duration–frequency (SDF) of droughts is crucial for successful ecosystem rehabilitation to overcome challenges of early vegetation establishment and long-term ecosystem resilience.
The objective of this study was to quantify the SDF of short-term and long-term drought events of 11 selected locations across a broad range of agro-climatic environments in eastern Australia by using three drought indices at different timescales: the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), the Reconnaissance Drought Index (RDI), and the Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI). Based on the indices we derived bivariate distribution functions of drought severity and duration, and estimated the recurrence intervals of drought events at different timescales. The correlation between the simple SPI and the more complex SPEI or RDI was stronger for the tropical and temperate locations than for the arid locations, indicating that SPEI or RDI can be replaced by SPI if evaporation plays a minor role for plant available water (tropics). Both short-term and long-term droughts were most severe and prolonged, and recurred most frequently in arid regions, but were relatively rare in tropical and temperate regions.
Our approach is similar to intensity–duration–frequency (IDF) analyses of rainfall, which are crucial for the design of hydraulic infrastructure. In this regard, we propose to apply SDF analyses of droughts to design ecosystem components in post-mining landscapes. Together with design rainfalls, design droughts should be used to assess rehabilitation strategies and ecological management using drought recurrence intervals, thereby minimising the risk of failure of initial ecosystem establishment due to ignorance of fundamental abiotic and site-specific environmental barriers, such as flood and drought events.
