Stockholm (NordSIP) – The mining sector has undoubtedly a crucial role to play in the green transition. The supply of raw materials is at the centre of most other industries’ decarbonisation and electrification efforts. Yet mining is carbon intensive, considered hard to abate, and associated with a plethora of environmental, social, and corporate governance risks. The sector is facing mounting pressure to shift to more sustainable practices. A first step towards this would be to increase the transparency and accountability of companies in the mining industry.
Taking a step in this direction, on 6 February, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) announced the launch of its new mining sector reporting standard. According to GRI, adopting the new standard would enable companies in the sector to disclose on a wide set of sustainability impacts, ranging from emissions and biodiversity to community impact and human rights.
“From a sustainability standpoint, the position of mining is complex, in that it is both part of the solution and the problem,” comments Carol Adams, Chair of GRI’s Global Sustainability Standards Board (GSSB). “The low-carbon transition cannot be realized without key minerals that the sector provides – yet mining operations can have deep and damaging impacts on both nature and people.”
GRI 14: Mining Sector 2024, is the fourth in a series of sector reporting standards by the GRI. Previous instalments have featured the oil and gas sector in 2021 covering as well as the agriculture, aquaculture, and fishing sectors in 2022. All in all, the GRI plans to develop standards for forty sectors. The order in which the initiative intends to tackle each of those will be dictated by the relative urgency. Sectors with the highest documented impacts across economic, environmental, and social dimensions are prioritised.
The new mining standard applies to all organisations engaged in mining and quarrying, including exploration and extraction, primary processing, and related support services. The document addresses twenty-five topics deemed to be material for companies in the sector. These include the usual suspects, such as emissions, waste, human rights to land, resource rights, climate change, child labour, anti-corruption, and community engagement. To help stakeholders assess the impacts and risks on a more granular level, the standard prescribes site-level transparency by location and specific minerals. Three of the topics addressed by the new standard are, however, completely new for GRI. These are tailings management, artisanal and small-scale mining, and operating in conflict zones.
It is obvious that a lot of effort has gone into compiling the new standard. It has been developed by an independent group of stakeholders across businesses, investors, labour groups, civil society, and mediating institutions, and incorporates expectations from responsible mining guidance and relevant standards, with inputs from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA), International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), Copper Mark, the OECD, and Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management (GISTM).
“We need detailed, consistent and globally comparable reporting on the most significant impacts of mining companies, which this new GRI Standard will deliver. Importantly, it will help mining organizations to improve how they communicate with key stakeholders on the issues that matter most to build trust with communities,” says Adams.
For those curious to learn more about the new standard, GRI will be organising two free global webinars later this month, on 28 and 29 February.
