Raw materials extraction has significant environmental and social impacts on local ecosystems and communities worldwide. As mining intensifies to support the energy transition, digital transformation, and the defence sector, multiple scientific communities are now closely monitoring these impacts not only at a site scale but globally. The need to understand local changes caused by mining has led researchers to increasingly focus on spatially explicit methods and approaches to map and assess these impacts at larger scales, e.g. national, regional, and global. The scalability of methods to monitor mining impacts is critical because minerals supply chains are highly complex, i.e. a single final consumption product can be linked to extraction sites distributed around the world, within regions with their specific characteristics (ecosystem types and services, community subsistence practices, local regulations, etc). Disentangling these spatial heterogeneities would provide the basis to improve assessments of impacts and risks of global supply chains and integrate spatially explicit datasets that would better represent the true impact of individual raw materials at their extraction sites and surroundings. This session invites contributions that move towards large-scale monitoring of the multiple impacts and operational aspects of mining at national and global levels, with a particular focus to the following topics:
This session invites contributions on large-scale monitoring of mining impacts and operations, focusing on
Land-use changes, degradation, and rehabilitation;
Biodiversity (loss and ecosystem service disruptions);
Social impacts;
Water resources (quantity, quality, scarcity, and downstream agricultural effects);
Carbon footprint assessments, leveraging large-scale spatial data from the sector;
Monitoring of mining waste and tailings, including tracking the evolution of waste volumes;
Remote sensing techniques to map mining activities and their impacts that demonstrate scalability;
Assessment of impacts from raw material extraction embodied in trade and final consumption of goods and services;
Self-reported data (corporate ESG reports);
Regional or global databases documenting mining activities;
Data collection methodologies (AI, ML, web scraping, crowdsourcing, etc).
Note: Site-specific case studies are out of scope. This session focuses exclusively on scalable, spatially explicit monitoring options for regional or global assessments.