Our enormous demand for sand is generating acute sustainability issues worldwide, yet at the same time the metal mining industry crushes-and discards-billions of tonnes of the same minerals as waste. A circular economy solution is possible, but only if we fundamentally change our perspective about mining.

Mine tailings—the residue remaining after mineral processing—represent a serious risk to the natural environment, and the failure of tailing storage facilities has caused some of the most serious environmental disasters in history. However, the potential biodiversity impacts globally due to tailings are mostly unknown. Here we assess the spatial coincidence between 1,721 disclosed tailings storage facilities and currently protected areas (PAs) and other conservation priorities (Key Biodiversity Areas and remaining intact ecosystems). Nine percent of storage facilities are located within PAs, half of which were established after the PA was designated. Another 20% of storage facilities are within 5 km of a PA, indicating even larger risks posed by upstream facility failures. Despite international commitments to mitigating biodiversity loss, tailings storage facilities continue to be established within PAs, with an upward trend in the proportion established within already-existing PAs. Given our findings, it is unsurprising that biodiversity factors are rarely included when assessing and categorizing the risks posed by new and existing tailings storage facilities. Greater transparency and a holistic consequence-based approach, supported by data, monitoring and new technologies are needed to drive reform at local, national and regional levels. Facilities that store the waste and tailings of mining operations pose a salient threat to biodiversity. Despite international consensus to mitigate mining impacts on local ecosystems, globally, nearly 10% of facilities are located within protected areas and another 20% can be found within 5 km of their boundaries.

Mining projects interact with diverse concurrent environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks inherent to the local hosting context. These risks known as "situated risks" usually have a relevant influence on the dynamics between operations, environment and communities. The appropriate assessment of these risks requires a multidisciplinary approach. This research aims to propose a novel ESG-W-RISK approach to prioritise water-related ESG risks areas for the mining industry at a national scale. In contrast to similar approaches at a global scale, it uses tailored indicators and more detailed datasets for the country, which are selected based on an initial analysis of the national context. Indicators are assembled to create risk maps. Mining locations are overlaid with the risk maps to identify mining areas of high risk. ESG-W-RISK aims to support decision-makers by helping them identify the relevant water-related risk areas, and ultimately it can provide insights for developing country-level mitigation strategies. ESG-W-RISK was applied to Chile, a country with an important mining sector that faces relevant water-related challenges. The results show that 43% of current mines and 44% of future projects are in high-risk areas, and 93% of both mines and future projects are in areas of high or very high risk of water scarcity. Particularly, the risk levels in the Chile's lithium and copper mining areas are more concerning than the previously published global-scale ESG risk levels.

Human-wildlife conflict is one of the most pressing sustainable development challenges globally. This is particularly the case where ecologically and economically important wildlife impact the livelihoods of humans. Large carnivores are one such group and their co-occurrence with low-income rural communities often results in real or perceived livestock losses that place increased costs on already impoverished households. Here we show the disparities associated with the vulnerability to conflict arising from large carnivores on cattle (Bos taurus) globally. Across the distribution of 18 large carnivores, we find that the economic vulnerability to predation losses (as measured by impacts to annual per capita income) is between two and eight times higher for households in transitioning and developing economies when compared to developed ones. This potential burden is exacerbated further in developing economies because cattle keepers in these areas produce on average 31% less cattle meat per animal than in developed economies. In the lowest-income areas, our estimates suggest that the loss of a single cow or bull equates to nearly a year and a half of lost calories consumed by a child. Finally, our results show that 82% of carnivore range falls outside protected areas, and five threatened carnivores have over one third of their range located in the most economically sensitive conflict areas. This unequal burden of human-carnivore conflict sheds light on the importance of grappling with multiple and conflicting sustainable development goals: protecting life on land and eliminating poverty and hunger.

Cobalt production is essential in supporting energy storage and electrification initiatives in the global transition to a low-carbon economy. The main aspects of cobalt production are examined through assessment of global demand and supply, the common geological settings and mineral processing routes, and the associated situated environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk factors. The supply risk of cobalt is high, owing to its primary extraction as a by-product during copper and nickel production from several deposit types. Concurrent ESG risks create additional complexity at the development and operational stages. The immediate forecast trend is an increase in global demand for cobalt accommodated by a corresponding increase in the production. However, reducing the supply risk and mitigating the complexity of the ESG dimensions of currently undeveloped ore sources is key for sustainable metal production. Future cobalt projects’ concurrent and innate interaction with different risk factors can only be managed if changes to mining operations are made, together with regulation of artisanal mining and reprocessing of mine waste streams for cobalt.

Global demand for energy transition metals is expected to lead to an intensification of mining activities and an increase in associated land disturbance and mine waste volumes. This paper forecasts global mine waste generation for four metals needed in batteries: copper, lithium, manganese, and nickel, and finds that waste volumes are likely to rise exponentially. Alternative extractive processes are required to achieve consequent waste reduction. Beneficial reduction outcomes include (1) smaller volumes and footprint area, (2) lower toxicity and chronic contamination, and (3) lower risk of catastrophic tailings dam failures. This paper reviews six mining and processing innovations that, if taken in combination, may achieve the needed reduction: mine waste (re)processing, environmental desulphurisation, dry-stacking and co-mingling, preconcentration and coarse particle flotation, ore-sand co-production, and in-situ recovery. None of these approaches can tackle the mine waste challenge individually, and the choice of method is site-dependent but, together, they provide promising alternatives to the current, increasingly wasteful mining practices.

We develop a novel approach to analysing decarbonisation strategies by linking global resource inventories with demographic systems. Our 'mine-town systems' approach establishes an empirical basis for examining the spatial extent of the transition and demographic effects of changing energy systems. The research highlights an urgent need for targeted macro-level planning as global markets see a decline in thermal coal and a ramp up of other mining commodities. Our findings suggest that ramping up energy transition metals (ETM) could be more disruptive to demographic systems than ramping down coal. The data shows asymmetry in the distribution of risks: mine-town systems within the United States are most sensitive to coal phase-out, while systems in Australia and Canada are most sensitive to ETM phase-in. A complete phase-out of coal could disrupt demographic systems with a minimum of 33.5 million people, and another 115.7 million people if all available ETM projects enter production.

Criticality and supply risk models seek to address concerns of potential disruption to global metal supply. These models need to incorporate disruption events that arise from within the mining industry's market structure. In this paper, we review what we refer to as events of "mine life cycle disruption". These include project abandonments, premature closures, care and maintenance, and ownership changes. Life cycle disruptions not only cause production disruptions but also embed social and environmental risks in global metal markets. They arise from the highly variable business environment in which the resources sector operates. Changing commodity prices directly influence mining revenues and drive decisions on whether to halt or push forward a project. While some disruptions are involuntary and induced by external economic conditions, others are purposefully triggered by certain mining companies that use them to their advantage. We examine the frequency of these disruptions based on a contemporary global inventory of 35,000 mining projects and present the findings against recent developments in the research literature. We conclude that life cycle disruption events are an important consideration in balancing the demand for metals and the social and environmental impacts of mining and propose pathways for managing these events and their effects.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Decarbonation of the energy system is required at an unprecedented scale to prevent global temperatures rising more than 2 degrees C. A suite of low carbon technologies will be required for this transition. Two of these technologies, wind turbines and electric vehicles, utilise rare earth elements that are sourced from a monopolised supply chain. This could pose a risk to attaining global climate targets. Using demand forecasting, this study shows that 2-degree targets are indeed vulnerable to the rare earth element supply chain. It was found that the consumption of rare earth elements in the electric vehicle industry is unsustainable under current market conditions, while wind turbines are relatively invulnerable to the supply risk of rare earth elements. The stark contrast in risk exposure of these technologies is clearly at odds with the economically optimal deployment projections given in the IEA 2DS scenario. Failure to incorporate these risks in future models will likely impair climate change mitigation efforts. (C) 2020 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Environmental, social and governance pressures should feature in future scenario planning about the transition to a low carbon future. As low-carbon energy technologies advance, markets are driving demand for energy transition metals. Increased extraction rates will augment the stress placed on people and the environment in extractive locations. To quantify this stress, we develop a set of global composite environmental, social and governance indicators, and examine mining projects across 20 metal commodities to identify the co-occurrence of environmental, social and governance risk factors. Our findings show that 84% of platinum resources and 70% of cobalt resources are located in high-risk contexts. Reflecting heightened demand, major metals like iron and copper are set to disturb more land. Jurisdictions extracting energy transition metals in low-risk contexts are positioned to develop and maintain safeguards against mining-related social and environmental risk factors.

Rising consumer demand is driving concerns around the "availability" and "criticality" of metals. Methodologies have emerged to assess the risks related to global metal supply. None have specifically examined the initial supply source: the mine site where primary ore is extracted. Environmental, social, and governance ("ESG") risks are critical to the development of new mining projects and the conversion of resources to mine production. In this paper, we offer a methodology that assesses the inherent complexities surrounding extractives projects. It includes eight ESG risk categories that overlay the locations of undeveloped iron, copper, and aluminum orebodies that will be critical to future supply. The percentage of global reserves and resources that are located in complex ESG contexts (i.e., with four or more concurrent medium-to-high risks) is 47% for iron, 63% for copper, and 88% for aluminum. This work contributes to research by providing a more complete understanding of source level constraints and risks to supply.

The formulation and use of scenarios is now a fundamental part of national and global efforts to assess and plan for climate change. While scenario development initially focused on the technical dimensions of energy, emissions and climate response, in recent years parallel sets of shared socio-economic pathways have been developed to portray the values, motivations, and sociopolitical and institutional dimensions of these systems. However, integrating the technical and social aspects of evolving energy systems is difficult, with transitions dependent on highly uncertain technological advances, social preferences, political governance, climate urgency, and the interaction of these elements to maintain or overcome systemic inertia. A broad range of interdisciplinary knowledge is needed to structure and evaluate these processes, many of which involve a mix of qualitative and quantitative factors. To structure and facilitate the necessary linkages this paper presents an approach for generating a plausible range of scenarios for an emerging energy technology. The method considers influences among technical and social factors that can encourage or impede necessary improvements in the performance and cost of the technology, as well the processes affecting public acceptance and the establishment of governance structures necessary to support effective planning and implementation. A Bayesian network is used to capture relationships among the technological and socioeconomic factors likely to affect the probability that the technology will achieve significant penetration and adoption. The method is demonstrated for carbon capture and storage (CCS): a potential technology on the pathway to deep decarbonization. A preliminary set of expert elicitations is conducted to illustrate how relationships between these factors can be estimated. This establishes a prior or baseline network that can be subsequently analyzed by choosing either optimistic or pessimistic assumptions for respective groups of technical and social variables, identifying sets of key factors that limit or encourage successful deployment.

Electric vehicles are poised to play a large role in the decarbonisation of the transportation sector. World governments have pledged to bring 13 million plug-in electric vehicles on the road by 2020 and 100 million by 2030. The rapid expansion required to meet these targets, from a global stock of 5 million electric vehicles in 2018, has the potential to be constrained by material supply chains. This study has identified 7 key elements which are significant supply risks to the electric vehicle industry: battery grade natural graphite, lithium and cobalt for electric vehicle batteries, and the rare earth elements dysprosium, terbium, praseodymium and neodymium for electric vehicle motors. None of these elements are able to be substituted without (i) increasing the supply risk of the other constrained elements, or (ii) altering industry wide manufacturing processes. The inability to fully mitigate material supply risks at the required market expansion rates is a key issue for minimising carbon emissions from the transportation sector.

1. Confronted by significant impacts to ecosystems world-wide, decision makers face the challenge of maintaining both biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services (ES). However, the objectives of managing biodiversity and supplying ES may not always be in concert, resulting in the need for trade-offs. Understanding these potential trade-offs is crucial for identifying circumstances under which conservation strategies designed to maximise either biodiversity or ES will result in win-win or win-lose outcomes. One important factor that may influence these outcomes are species interactions and the structure of the networks in which they are embedded. 2. We combine optimisation and network theory to investigate the difference in species prioritisation and management outcomes when targeting biodiversity or ES, by considering trophic interactions between species. We analyse 360 simulated ecosystem networks with different ecosystem structures, including the trophic level of the species providing the ES, the number of ES considered, and the food web connectivity. We then illustrate the framework on a saltmarsh case study. 3. We find that trade-offs between biodiversity and ES depend on the network structure of the ecosystem being managed. The trophic level of the species providing the ES is an important determinant of optimal species protection priorities and the biodiversity-ES trade-offs. A strategy targeting ES leads to similar levels of biodiversity conservation (a win-win situation) only when basal species provide the services. In contrast, food web connectivity and the number of services considered have little impact on biodiversity-ES trade-offs.

1. Seed dispersal by birds is central to the passive restoration of many tree communities. Reintroduction of extinct seed dispersers can therefore restore degraded forests and woodlands. To test this, we constructed a spatially explicit simulation model, parameterized with field data, to consider the effect of different seed dispersal scenarios on the extent of oak populations. We applied the model to two islands in California's Channel Islands National Park (USA), one of which has lost a key seed disperser. 2. We used an ensemble modelling approach to simulate island scrub oak (Quercus pacifica) demography. The model was developed and trained to recreate known population changes over a 20-year period on 250-km(2) Santa Cruz Island, and incorporated acorn dispersal by island scrub-jays (Aphelocoma insularis), deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) and gravity, as well as seed predation. We applied the trained model to 215-km(2) Santa Rosa Island to examine how reintroducing island scrub-jays would affect the rate and pattern of oak population expansion. Oak habitat on Santa Rosa Island has been greatly reduced from its historical extent due to past grazing by introduced ungulates, the last of which were removed by 2011. 3. Our simulation model predicts that a seed dispersal scenario including island scrub-jays would increase the extent of the island scrub oak population on Santa Rosa Island by 281% over 100 years, and by 544% over 200 years. Scenarios without jays would result in little expansion. Simulated long-distance seed dispersal by jays also facilitates establishment of discontinuous patches of oaks, and increases their elevational distribution. 4. Synthesis and applications. Scenario planning provides powerful decision support for conservation managers. We used ensemble modelling of plant demographic and seed dispersal processes to investigate whether the reintroduction of seed dispersers could provide cost-effective means of achieving broader ecosystem restoration goals on California's second-largest island. The simulation model, extensively parameterized with field data, suggests that re-establishing the mutualism with seed-hoarding jays would accelerate the expansion of island scrub oak, which could benefit myriad species of conservation concern.