Last month saw two major breakthroughs that could greatly improve the well-being of host mining communities. However, the real challenge now is ensuring these initiatives are effectively put into action - a task that will not be without its difficulties.
The Global Investor Commission on Mining 2030 released a report called ‘The Role of Investors in Realising an Environmentally and Socially Responsible Mining Industry’.
It aims to engage institutional investors with mining companies, offering recommendations on traceability, addressing historical legacies, and delivering fair benefits to host communities.
This report is an important step in rehabilitating mining’s image with institutional investors who often associate it with poor host community relations and local environmental degradation.
The Commission already has the support of institutional investors managing $15 trillion in assets and aims to win over more of the global asset management industry, which controls an estimated $120 trillion.
Positive outcomes
These institutions, as part owners of listed mining companies, can be a major force for good. They can influence mining company boards towards greater social and environmental responsibility while rewarding miners with the necessary capital to keep supplying the metals the world needs.
Another encouraging development is the Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative (CMSI), which complements the Commission's goals. This industry consultation seeks to consolidate various voluntary mining standards into one unified standard. It involves four important industry groups: The Copper Mark, the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), the Mining Association of Canada (MAC), and the World Gold Council (WGC).
The standard covers 24 performance areas grouped under the four pillars of ethical business practices, worker and social safeguards, social performance and environmental stewardship.
A responsibility benchmark
There are many very positive proposals in the consultation, such as identifying, monitoring and mitigating adverse risks to local communities.
Institutional investors will appreciate the recommendation that mining companies should publicly disclose the commitments they’re making to improve host communities’ social and economic development. It allows investors to see what mining companies are doing at ground level and to compare their social performance.
There is also a recommendation to provide host communities with economic opportunities and to encourage the participation of women, vulnerable and underrepresented stakeholders. I agree that it’s vitally important that everyone in host communities benefits from local mining activities.
Making it happen
The next stage is, unfortunately, more difficult and that rests around implementation. I’ve been working with local mining communities for over 15 years and though challenging, the work is incredibly rewarding. When mining companies are engaged as development partners, lives and communities can be transformed for the better.
One of the challenges is that each host community is unique, due to its location, culture and the nature of the mining project. Some are based in dense jungles, others in deserts and some lie on the edge of sprawling urban areas. There are no cookie cutter solutions here - a tailored approach is always needed to make these social programmes deliver for locals.
At Metals for Humanity, the design of our programmes is shaped by the particular needs of each community we work with. Development agencies are well aware of the high cost of replicating projects without truly engaging local communities. As a social anthropologist, I’ve seen firsthand how these well-intentioned efforts often fall short, repeating the same failures.
Community participation
Every programme we implement is informed by active community participation, focused on creating honest dialogue and building confidence, often through creative means. By working with each community, together we outline their most salient needs and explore how to address them through collaborative networks. For their part, mining companies are inspired to see how their own products can become part of the solutions to communities’ needs.
Our approach is characterised by some basic steps that are fixed (but mostly universally applicable) and others that are contextually dependent (but largely flexible in their application across sites).
Some key aspects are:
A big win
The CMSI and the Global Investor Commission on Mining 2030 initiatives represent an enormous opportunity to benefit thousands of deprived communities across the world while rehabilitating a crucially important industry with investors and society. It is vitally important that they succeed.
