Mining — like any other sector — has experienced its fair share of issues over the past decade, holding back its overall reputation and efficiency.
Below, we take a look at each of the major obstacles to the long-term sustainability of mining, and what the industry has to mitigate these risks.One of the biggest challenges facing the mining industry is a growing skills gap created by an aging workforce and a dearth of talent waiting next in line.
The bigger problem for the industry though, is a shortage of new talent to replace the old when the time comes. According to Copan, the pipeline of people servicing the sector from the leadership level to engineering and extractive metallurgy are being replaced only at a trickle in the United States, Canada, Australia and in Europe.
As noted in a recent Bloomberg article, fewer students now want to be geologists or engineers, partly due to mining’s negative image regarding pollution, human rights and gender equality. That’s leaving the industry with an aging workforce and forcing it to recruit from outside the traditional university talent pool, such as through apprenticeship programs and internal training.
"There’s been a bit of a lost decade in people going through university in mining courses — that’s proving to really come to crunch point now," said Alison Allen, deputy managing director at UK-based mining consultancy Wardell Armstrong."There are too few graduates filling needs." "For the large number of mines that are remote, we observe a set of additional significant structural challenges, such as lack of sophisticated infrastructure and therefore lower family friendliness. Equally, there is the perception that the work is physically demanding and hazardous.
In EY Canada’s most up-to-date ranking of risks disrupting the mining industry, it has geopolitics in 2nd place, up two places from the 2022 list .In mining, political instability often manifests itself in the form of resource nationalism, which is loosely defined as the tendency of people and governments to assert control, for strategic and economic reasons, over natural resources located on their territory. It is often described as a backward form of state protectionism.
Resource-dependent countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America recorded the greatest increase in risk. Source: Verisk Maplecroft Zambia made it into Maplecroft’s riskiest places to operate in due to an attempted liquidation of Konkola Copper Mines, whereas in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Congolese government in 2018 raised taxes on mining firms and increased royalties. The country is Africa’s biggest producer of copper and cobalt.
These factors can create pressure on a state to increase its"take" from its natural resources, it said. When S&P Global released its first scorecard for metals and mining companies in 2020, it found that the mining industry has"well-above-average" exposure to environmental risks, resulting from land use, waste, pollution and water usage. Since then, the emphasis on ESG has only grown bigger.
Over two-thirds of recorded allegations are against 12 companies, which are among the largest and most well-established of the extractive sector, including Grupo Mexico, Codelco, BHP, Anglo American and Glencore. One-third of all allegations of abuses involve attacks on those defending the environment or communities.
According to the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada , 2022 marked a reversal of money flowing into the mineral industry from virtually every global source as equity financing was down 50% from the nearly $35 billion raised in 2021. Canada appears one of only few countries holding up as well or better than the other major marketplaces around the world.
This, according to McKinsey, suggests that although growth is once again on their agendas, executive teams and boards remain cautious about using large-scale capital projects to fuel growth.
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