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Anticipating the unforeseeable? ESG risk management in mining companies

2025· article· en· W4410489445 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Olivier Boiral, Marie‐Christine Brotherton, David Talbot

Bibliographic record

VenueResources Policy · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicMining and Resource Management
Canadian institutionsÉcole Nationale d'Administration PubliqueInstitut National de Santé Publique du QuébecUniversité Laval
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsBusinessRisk managementFinance

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The aim of this article is to investigate the foreseeability of environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks in the mining sector by analyzing the impacts anticipated when mining projects were first submitted to the authorities, and crises or critical incidents observed ex-post at mining sites. An in-depth analysis of 57 critical sustainability incidents that occurred at 19 different Canadian mining sites, and of the way in which companies and stakeholders anticipated or failed to anticipate them in prior risk analyses, enables us to map the main impacts of this industry and to highlight the uneven ability of companies and stakeholders to effectively anticipate them. The results obtained were analyzed through an integrative model with four main configurations of risk foreseeability: high-visibility risks (good anticipation by both companies and stakeholders), stakeholder red flags (risks identified by stakeholders only), corporate foresight (risks identified by companies only) and black swans (risks neglected by both companies and stakeholders). This article makes substantial contributions to the literature on the foreseeability of ESG risks, the uncertain ways that polluting companies integrate such risks into their planning, and the management of critical sustainability incidents. Practical implications and avenues for future research are also developed. • Risk can be anticipated by companies or stakeholders. • Mining companies de not systematically integrate ESG risks into their planning. • Critical incidents are multidimensional and can cover many ESG risks. • Stakeholders are better than companies to anticipate ESG risks.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.008
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.147
Threshold uncertainty score0.292

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.008
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0040.004
Scholarly communication0.0070.004
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0020.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.253
Teacher spread0.243 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations8
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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