Mining and the Long Arc of Sustainability: Where We Were, Where We Are, and What Still Needs to Change
Updated: Apr 8
By: Tracy Lydiatt – CTFutures, Senior Strategist
In 2008, I sat in Karlskrona, Sweden with two remarkable colleagues, Patricia Mesquita (Brazilian Social Scientist consultant in Mining) and Anne Nolan (Australian Health and Safety Consultant in Mining) and asked a question that felt almost naïve at the time:
“How can the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development assist mining projects to contribute strategically to a sustainable society?”
We called ourselves BIM, Babes in Mining, a cheeky nod to the fact that we were three women applying a rigorous sustainability framework to one of the world’s oldest, most extractive, and most socially fraught industries. Our thesis was theoretical. The recommendations had never been tested on a real mine. And the industry we were critiquing was in the middle of a commodity supercycle driven by BRIC-country industrialization, with sustainability mostly understood as “doing less harm.”
Nearly two decades later, I find myself thinking about that thesis a lot, mostly because the challenges with sustainability haven’t really changed but the urgency has. Also, the mining landscape has shifted in ways that are both genuinely hopeful and, in certain cases, still deeply insufficient.
Where We Were in 2008: Compliance, Boom Times, and Getting Lost in the Leaves
When we applied the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) to mining in 2008, the industry was in a peculiar position. There was genuine momentum on sustainability: the MMSD report had come out in 2002, Breaking New Ground: Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development1, which summarized a two-year process of research resulting in a description of the minerals sector and its relationship to sustainable development. It was a groundbreaking report, among the first to articulate a sector-wide sustainability agenda, with both immediate and long-term actions.
The International Council on Mining and Minerals (ICMM) had also published its 10 Principles for Sustainable Development2, and major companies were producing glossy sustainability reports. But our research, including interviews with industry practitioners, consultants, NGOs and academics, kept revealing the same structural gap: the industry was working hard on the details while largely ignoring the foundation of the sustainability challenge.
In the FSSD, we use a tree metaphor to describe this problem. Individual sustainability issues are referred to as leaves on a sustainability tree. Examples of these include: water contamination, acid mine drainage, community displacement, GHG emissions, tailing dam integrity. The trunk and branches are represented by the underlying systemic causes of unsustainability, which when focused on, provide an opportunity to define sustainability success by working to avoid these causes. Our research in 2008 uncovered the most common definition of success for a mine project was almost universally defined as
“producing ore at least cost within environmental licensing regulations and with minimal complaint from the local community.”
That definition of success, compliance-based, cost-led, harm-minimizing, was the beating heart of how most mining projects were planned and evaluated in 2008. We viewed this definition through the lens of the FSSD, which forwarded different approaches to the creation of project sustainability success including:
Backcasting from a vision of a sustainable society
Participatory visioning with communities at the outset of exploration
Strategic planning linked to a larger vision of success (like how mining provides value in a sustainable society)
Sustainability analyses embedded into project phases
Tools for prioritization of strategies and actions that move projects towards the vision
These were novel ideas. Our thesis proposed them while also acknowledging, honestly, that we had not been able to test them on an operating mine.
There was also a telling conceptual barrier we identified: the industry misread the first Sustainability Principle of the FSSD: that “nature is not subject to systematically increasing concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust”, as meaning “no mining.”
This is wrong.
The principle addresses the systematic increase of concentrations of mined materials that either outflow natural flows, are scarce in nature and therefore need to be managed in tight technical loops, or because of mining, occur in concentrated forms that then present hazardous conditions, not extraction per se. But the language gap meant that a scientifically grounded framework for planning was being rejected by the very industry that stood to benefit most from it.
And critically, Indigenous rights and Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) were on the radar in 2008 and were listed in our table of social challenges, but they were largely treated as a compliance hurdle or reputational risk to be managed rather than a fundamental question of rights, justice, and co-governance.
Where We Are Now: Genuine Progress and a Structural Irony
The shift between 2008 and today, 18 years later, is real and encouraging.
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting has moved from a voluntary aspiration to a financial and legal imperative. In October 2024, the ICMM, the Mining Association of Canada, and the World Gold Council announced a joint initiative to align and simplify the sector’s fragmented ESG standards into a coherent, auditable framework3. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has published a Sector Standard specifically for mining4.
The International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) S1 and S2 sustainability disclosure standards are being adopted by at least 20 countries representing over half of global GDP5. Mandatory climate disclosure is arriving. ESG-related litigation is becoming a real and growing risk for boards and executives.
The language of “social license to operate” has deepened and is evolving rapidly. We are now seeing language like “nature-positive mining” (ICMM’s 2024 commitment), circular economy thinking applied to critical minerals, and genuine investment in decarbonizing mine operations. BHP is targeting a 32% cut in operational GHG emissions by 2030. Rio Tinto has committed to a 50% reduction. Battery-electric haul trucks are in trials. Renewable energy is increasingly powering mine sites. These are not small things.
Materials stewardship, which we identified in 2008 as “an emerging concern with a lot still to be done”, is now a core strategic issue, driven by the energy transition. Recycling of battery minerals is becoming a profitable growth area. Supply chain transparency is being demanded by regulators and investors. The linear model of extract-use-dispose is, at least in principle, being replaced by circular thinking. We see the emergence of companies founded on circular mining concepts such as Canada’s Regeneration, focused on the processing of mine tailings and who has an offtake agreement with jewelry manufacturer, Mejuri. Other initiatives such as the Energy Futures Lab – Future Materials Alliance demonstrate the results involved in mapping out Western Canada’s critical mineral mining ecosystems to make sense of their supply chains and to look for value along the chain; both for circular mining and for the enhancement of social value.
The irony 18 years on? The mining industry is being asked to supply the very materials needed to decarbonize the global economy; largely through the use of lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and rare earths, but at a pace and scale that puts enormous pressure on exactly the ecological and social system risks our thesis warned about. If we apply the analogy of a funnel; one side being ecological limits and the other being social wellbeing, we can see that the funnel is narrowing faster, not slower. The walls are closing in from both sides, pressurizing the timelines to find solutions.
What’s Still Missing: The Gap Between Reporting and Backcasting
The central argument of our 2008 thesis was not that mining companies were doing nothing. They clearly were and we documented strategies for dematerialization, substitution, detoxification, community development, and more. The argument was that these actions weren’t held together by a systems-based strategy guided by a scientific-principled vision of sustainability. They were tool-level actions without a system-level compass. The risk of this approach is siloed efforts, reductionism and drowning in trade-off decision making, which without a link back to a systems-based strategy, presents the risk of low ROI or stranded assets / efforts made by mining companies.
Reading the current ESG landscape through that same lens, I’m not sure we’ve fully solved this. The proliferation of reporting frameworks — ISSB, CSRD, GRI, TCFD, TSM, ICMM Principles — is in some ways the modern version of the problem we diagnosed. Incredibly sophisticated at the tools level. Still somewhat fragmented at the strategy level. Still often driven by compliance and investor pressure rather than by a shared, principled definition of what a sustainable mining sector looks like.
Backcasting (planning backwards) from sustainability principles asks: what does success look like in a sustainable society, and what steps do we need to take today to move toward that, flexibly and strategically? Most current ESG frameworks are doing something closer to improved forecasting: how do we get incrementally better than last year, measured against our own baselines and sector peers? These are not the same things.
The place where I think this gap is most consequential right now is in the critical minerals rush. The speed and scale of demand for energy transition minerals is creating real pressure to shortcut exactly the kinds of early-phase, systems-level stakeholder engagement and sustainability analysis we argued for in 2008. The boom-and-bust cycles, the “beat the competition to market” logic, the tendency to raise expectations and then lose trust. All of this is at risk of repeating itself, each within different commodity segments.
Indigenous Rights: From Checkbox to Co-Governance
In 2008, our thesis listed “loss of indigenous rights and access to traditional lands” alongside “large volumes of waste rock” in a table of social and environmental issues. That framing, Indigenous rights as an issue to be managed, reflects the limits of how the industry, and honestly how many of us working in sustainability at the time, understood the question.
The shift since 2008 has been significant. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (UNDRIP) has been formally adopted in Canada6. Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is increasingly embedded in both regulatory frameworks and investor expectations. The language of reconciliation, rights-holders (not just stakeholders), and co-governance is now mainstream in Canadian mining discourse. The Future Materials Alliance initiative at the Energy Futures Lab, for example, explicitly names Indigenous leadership as a core work-stream, not a consultation box to be checked.
But meaningful implementation of Indigenous co-governance in mining remains, in many cases, a gap between stated commitment and lived reality. The speed of the critical minerals pushes risks repeating historic patterns of raising expectations without delivering durable benefit-sharing, genuine decision-making authority, or the slow, trust-building work that FPIC actually requires.
This is an area where I continue to build my own understanding. It’s also one of the reasons I’m genuinely excited about the kind of multi-actor, systems-level work that sits at the intersection of mining, specifically critical minerals and reconciliation, namely the hard work of aligning actors who don’t naturally speak the same language, around a shared vision of what “good” actually means. Grounding our work from a vision of mining’s contributions to a sustainable society and planning backwards from there.
The Role of the Funnel: Tightening, Not Easing
One of the most durable ideas from our 2008 thesis is the funnel metaphor. The funnel represents the limits of the system: resources society depends on are decreasing, while population and demand are increasing. The walls close in over time, reducing the room to manoeuvre toward a sustainable society. The earlier you act, the more room you have.
What’s changed since 2008 is not the metaphor, but our position within it. We are further in.
The walls are closer as evidenced by:
Extreme weather events disrupting mine operations
Water scarcity is a strategic risk in multiple mining regions
Biodiversity loss is being formally recognized as a financial risk through frameworks like TNFD7
Copper demand is expected to grow from 28.3 million tonnes (“Mt”) in 2020 to 40.9 Mt in 20408
Lithium demand rose by nearly 30%, demand for nickel, cobalt, graphite and rare earth elements rose by 6-8% in 20249
Social impacts continue to put pressure on the mining sector’s ability to develop projects. Select and generalized examples modified from the 2026 paper: “The social impacts of mining in northern Canada: Contemporary manifestations of an enduring challenge”10 include:
Environmental → social cascade: Land and water contamination raising food safety concerns with Indigenous communities, deeply impacting central cultural aspects around food gathering and connection to the land
Impacts on Workers and families: Mine work schedules leave little time for hunting, ceremony, or family. Women are sometimes forced to quit upon having children, creating economic precarity and dependency, pressure to speak English, social isolation from non-Indigenous co-workers, discrimination from management, and restriction to lower-level positions with limited advancement.
Community-level erosion. Displacement of traditional sharing economies by a monetized economy represents a potential breakdown in the reciprocity and collective responsibility that underpin community cohesion and governing capacity.
Governance burden. Indigenous governments receive mining revenues, however the rapid pace of new development simultaneously overwhelms limited personnel and resources, consuming governance capacity that might otherwise be directed toward climate adaptation, cultural revitalization, or community wellbeing.
And yet the opportunity the funnel metaphor was always meant to highlight is still there. Business that acts strategically from a principled definition of sustainability, not just compliance, not just incremental improvement, but genuine backcasting from a vision of success, is better positioned to navigate what’s coming. The companies and coalitions doing this work now are building something durable, more resilient to adapt to increasing risks while meeting the global demands and pressing timelines. The ones still focused on reporting metrics without the underlying strategic compass are at growing risk.
What I’d Tell My 2008 Self
Our thesis concluded that mining, done strategically and with a systems-based vision of sustainability, could “top up” the metals stock in society needed by a circular economy, rather than being the extractive engine of a linear one. That vision feels more relevant and more urgent now than it did in 2008.
What I’d tell the three of us working together while in Karlskrona: the framework holds. The gaps you identified are real. The language barriers, the compliance-first logic, the tool-level actions without system-level strategy, the underestimation of what early-phase community engagement actually requires: all of it is still recognizable in 2026. But the context has changed in a fundamental way: mining is now inescapably central to the climate transition.
The political and economic stakes of getting it right, or wrong, are higher than anything the BRIC supercycle generated.
The FSSD question is still the right one: not “how do we do less harm?” but “what does a sustainable mining sector look like, and what do we do today; flexibly, strategically, with full systems awareness to move toward it?”
That’s the work. And there’s a lot of it left to do.
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Tracy Lydiatt is a geologist and sustainability consultant, and a member of CTFutures, a subsidiary of Lansdowne Consulting. Her MSc thesis applied the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development to the mining industry. She works at the intersection of ESG assessment, participatory process design, and multi-stakeholder facilitation in BC’s mining and clean tech sectors.
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