Measuring what? A comparative anatomy of five mining sustainability frameworks

Recent years have seen a proliferation of frameworks for assessing and reporting mining sustainability. While these frameworks vary substantially in scope and approach, they all seem to share the purported goal of better informing decision-makers about the future implications of mining to the environment and society. Whether they do so, however, remains an open question. The purpose of this paper is to describe, compare and critically analyse five sustainability assessment and reporting frameworks used by, or proposed for, the mining industry. Based on literature reviews, the paper highlights the underlying assumptions of those frameworks and presents a diagram that helps to clarify aspects such as temporal orientation, geographical scope and quantity of indicators. Three out of the five frameworks follow a siloed approach to assessing mining sustainability, overlooking trade-offs and synergies among variables and sustainability dimensions. None of the frameworks seems to fully shed light on the problem of mineral scarcity and the effective legacy of mineral operations. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need to carefully consider the information generated by the analysed frameworks and suggest more fruitful ways to foster sustainability reports.

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