Embedding climate change risk into mine closure planning: a case study of tailings closure design at Ballarat Gold Mine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is commonly accepted that climate change is a global challenge requiring a strong response led by both government and business. Rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases are increasing the severity and occurrence of extreme weather events such as storms and heatwaves and are accelerating rising sea levels. This changing climate will affect the infrastructure and resources sector both directly and indirectly. By building operational climate resilience today, companies can limit future liabilities, support business continuity, and improve the sustainability of communities and ecosystems. With an increased focus on closure planning and design within the resources industry, especially in tailings management, it is important to establish a clear set of expectations early in the planning phase. Closure planning provides mines and smelters an opportunity to evaluate climate projections under different emission scenarios, identify and assess potential future climate hazards and associated risks, and modify final landform design to accommodate the identified physical climate risks. In several countries, nominally Australia, Canada and Chile, long-term assessment of tailings closure landforms is considered essential within the industry. For such assessments to be effective, long-term climate change data projections are required. By undertaking such assessments early, the closure design team can accommodate both current and forward hydrological projections as well as long-term behavioural changes of the capping material, with respect to potential changes in climate conditions such as increased temperatures and extended solar exposure. This process has recently been successfully implemented at Ballarat Gold Mine as part of the closure and rehabilitation planning process. The results of these assessments, while being used in the design and forward planning of the closure of the tailings storage facility (TSF), have also been incorporated into the site-wide risk assessment and risk management plan. This paper outlines the climate change risk assessment process undertaken for the Ballarat Gold Mine TSF, specifically the considerations, procedures and outcomes of the assessment. It furthermore describes how these prompted a re-evaluation of the final TSF design to enable it to withstand projected extreme climate events.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".