Assessment of sustainable and responsible mining standards and guidelines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Addressing climate change necessitates new technologies (e.g., e-mobility vehicles, renewable energy, etc.) that require numerous mineral resources.Consequently, extensive exploration and mining development projects are underway in remote regions around the world.These initiatives have notably increased in the Arctic Circle, Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America.This has created a significant dilemma.On one hand, combating climate change requires mineral resources, while on the other hand, mining activities contribute to serious environmental and social problems.In parallel to these trends, the mining industry includes tools to measure the sustainability and responsible performance of its operations.In recent years, many voluntary sustainable/responsible mining standard initiatives have emerged (e.g., the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the Global Reporting Initiative Standards, the Towards Sustainable Mining program, and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board).These organizations issue certificates to mining corporations based on their performance regarding sustainability, transparency, business conduct, justice, social acceptance, health and safety, environmental impact, and community engagement.The merits of these standards have not been investigated in detail.The extent of acceptance of these initiatives among mining stakeholders is not yet fully known.This thesis investigates the merits and potential of voluntary standard initiatives through comparative content analysis.The objective is to compare voluntary standard efforts against each other and propose a plan to consolidate and potentially legislate these standards.Each mining operation faces unique challenges depending on the jurisdiction, location, commodity type, proximity of local and Indigenous communities, biodiversity vulnerabilities, legal/regulatory frameworks, externalities, and social impacts.Therefore, mining stakeholders should be equipped with an in-depth understanding of these standards.This thesis will enhance the understanding of the standards that align with the specifics of mining operations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.089 | 0.184 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".