Mainstreaming Natural Capital for Sustainable Mining in Mongolia

The mining industry is a nexus of global climate, nature, and economic challenges. The global energy transition depends on a range of minerals and metals, and on securing vital ecosystem values in the mining process. Failure to do so could disrupt supply chains and undermine confidence and momentum in the transition. Mongolia has one of the world’s richest endowments of minerals and metals and is among the last mining frontiers: less than one-third of its territory has been geologically surveyed and only 1% licensed for mining exploration. Exploiting this potential is crucial to realizing the country’s economic potential. However, to meet sustainability goals, Mongolia also needs to address the social and ecological risks from the expansion of industrial mining.

Our research provides strategies for transitioning Mongolia’s mining sector towards sustainability by incorporating natural capital assessments and valuations into the planning and operation of mining projects. Scalable industry standards for climate and land stewardship in the mining sector could be identified based on these analyses. We deploy the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) data and software platform to quantify how mining impacts critical ecosystem services – such as carbon sequestration, flood mitigation, maintenance of water quality, rangeland production, and sandstorm protection – and the resulting social and economic implications.

This is the first deployment of these tools to analyze mining-related impacts on natural capital, as well as the first application of asset-specific footprinting for mining supply chains. Quantifying these impacts and developing policies to mitigate them is crucial for the sustainability of the mining sector in Mongolia and many other countries.