Evaluation of positive and negative impacts of mining on sustainable development by a semi-quantitative method

Abstract

Mining has contributed a significant role in improving societies to the modern civilization by providing the necessary raw minerals. The mining industry influences economic growth at the national and regional levels. This industry has also played a substantial role in improving the quality of human life by creating jobs, increasing life expectancy, skills and knowledge, contributing to the proper distribution of income, and improving infrastructure, public health services, and education. However, mining's various negative environmental and social consequences, such as land disturbance, water, soil, air pollution, and socio-cultural aspects, made mining a challenge to sustainable development. These impacts attracted the attention of the environmental defenders and legislators to investigate the impact of mining activity on the three indices of sustainable development; environment, Social, and economy. In most previous studies, only the negative impacts were considered in determining the level of sustainability or unsustainability, which may mislead the managers and policymakers to wrong and unreal decisions and strategies. In this study, for the first time, both positive and negative factors of the mining operation are incorporated simultaneously in the framework of a hybrid semi-quantitative model combined with a multi-criteria decision-making approach to evaluate the sustainability of the mining activities. The proposed holistic model identified 43 influential factors, including 22 positive and 21 negative factors, and their impacts on the proposed 13 sub-criteria of sustainable development were evaluated. The model is able to calculate the sustainability score for both negative and positive factors individually and in combination. The proposed model was verified in Sungun Copper Mine as large-scale open-pit mining. Analyses showed that “Social Relationship, Economic Growth and Productivity” and “Flora and Fauna, Landscape and Social Infrastructure Developments” are the two sets of three top sustainable development sub-criteria which contributed the most positive and negative impacts on the sustainability of mining activity, respectively. Results indicated that the mining operations in total are slightly sustainable, with a total score of 4.20, and have slightly enhanced the economic and social conditions while having posed unsustainability in the environmental index. Finally, as the proposed holistic model considers both negative and positive impacting factors, it will provide a realistic value for the individual and total sustainability score of mining activities. This model can also be used by other industries adopting their corresponding conditions, impacting factors, regulations, and laws in the sustainability evaluation process.