Satellite-Based Quantification of Temporal Changes in Mine Areas and their Environmental Footprint

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles are critical for improving sustainable mining practices and ensuring mining accountability in mitigating environmental and social impacts. Geometallurgy enhances the efficiency of resource extraction and processing by integrating geological, mineralogical, and metallurgical data throughout exploration and operational phases. Mining operations can contribute to ESG goals, decrease waste, and maximise resource utilisation by identifying temporal changes in mine surface features and their environmental impacts for optimisation. These impacts arise from processes throughout the mine life cycle, requiring continuous monitoring of mine expansion and environmental footprint. Hence, predicting the feasibility of a mining project as early as possible is crucial to minimising the impact of exploration activities and avoiding later failures that could have been anticipated. To this purpose, we develop a strategy to include ESG aspects as early as possible in addition to the now common geometallurgical aspects. This study integrates a range of satellite sources (SPOT 1-5, Landsat 5-9, Sentinel-2, and high-resolution Google Earth imagery) to quantify temporal changes in mine surface features across four mines (Vametco, Mogalakwena, Trident, and Gamsberg) representing diverse commodities (vanadium, platinum, copper, and zinc) and identify environmental impact trends for assessment and planning. We manually mapped key mine features, such as pits, overburden waste dumps, tailing dams, slag dumps, stockpiles, and processing areas. Using deep learning methods, we used mine features as training data to explore temporal multiclass change detection with multisource satellite data. We compare the manually mapped results with the deep learning methods and analyse correlations across mine sections, focusing on lateral expansions of mine surface features rather than vertical or depth expansions. Additionally, we assess how mine operations affect environmental components like vegetation, land use, and carbon emissions. Our results demonstrate the usage of satellite data for cost-effective mine monitoring to improve transparency and support compliance with ESG guidelines.