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.

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Summary The circular economy (CE) concept advocates drastically reduced primary resource extraction in favor of secondary material flowing through internal loops. However, it is unreasonable to think that society will not need any resources, for example, metals, from mining activities in the short, medium, or longer term. This article explores the role of the mining industry in transitioning to the CE and shows that mines can make significant progress if they apply the CE principles at the mine site level. Circular flows within the economy aim at keeping resources in use for as long as possible and limit final waste disposal. Likewise, operating mines for as long as minerals can be extracted at acceptable environmental costs, thus minimizing the loss of a nonrenewable resource, can be viewed as a contribution of the mining industry to CE objectives. To test this idea, we propose a framework where the conservation of nonrenewable resources is a core concern. The first part establishes a set of material flow indicators relevant to a mine project. The second part considers the entire mine's life cycle, in particular, the consequences of interruptions in activities on material losses. The framework is then illustrated by a case study of the Mount Morgan mine in Australia, where three distinct extractive strategies were applied throughout its history. The results from applying the framework show that proactive and preventive management of mining waste provides significant environmental benefits and generates value from mine waste. These outcomes illustrate that the concept of the CE can be applied in a practical manner to a mining operation.

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