Environmental & social maturity as a new concept for self assessment of best practice in a mining context

Significant industrial and mining incidents have motivated widespread studies into the relationship between safety culture and the incidence of workplace accidents. Safety culture maturity has been used to develop a tool that enables organisations to self-assess their overall safety performance. In modern day mining operations, risks are also evaluated in terms of environmental and social (E&S) impacts, which is built into mine planning. In this work, we apply the principles of safety maturity to E&S factors to develop a novel approach to cultural maturity, allowing companies to self-scrutinize their operational practices from an E&S perspective. The culture models each comprise 5 levels that progressively increase in maturity, with the goal being to improve standards by implementing the criteria provided at each stage, based on factors such as community involvement, employment opportunities, energy use, etc. The case studies used to develop the model are located in Bosnia and Herzegovina where several mines recommenced operations recently following conflict in the region. This was chosen to consider the specific, complex challenges that are most influential in earning an SLO, and it is predicted that the outcome of a mining project is primarily influenced by the level of trust between the company and communities.