Open Collections

Innis, Sally

University of British Columbia

The failures of tailings storage facilities (TSFs) can produce tailings flows that can result in long-lasting environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Targeted, collaborative stakeholder action to improve TSF management is imperative to mitigate future TSF failures. This thesis aims to make a practical contribution to resolving this challenge by developing tools to drive involvement from influential mining stakeholders, including institutional mining investors and policymakers. The first stage of work explored the role of mining investors in mitigating TSF failures through qualitative interviews and an extensive literature review. Investors were found to play a unique role in improving tailings management. It was concluded that institutional mining investors need tools and frameworks to meaningfully incorporate TSF risks into investment decisions. To address the needs of institutional investors, the second stage of work involved developing a high-level empirical tailings flow model, LAHARZ-T. LAHARZ-T presents a first-order methodology to investigate downstream areas with the potential of being impacted by tailings flows recalibrating a Geographic Information System (GIS)-based computer program originally developed for the inundation area mapping of lahars. The model was calibrated and validated and found to offer an efficient method for regional scale inundation mapping of potential TSF failures. Following the development of LAHARZ-T, the model and methodology were tested as a tool supporting mining stakeholders in evaluating the consequences of potential TSF failures at large-scales. By modelling the potential socio-environmental impacts from 248 TSF failures across five mining countries, the differences in potential TSF consequence profiles between mining countries were explored. The results show that populations and waterbodies are often impacted in TSF failure scenarios but depend on the country of analysis. However, data scarcity issues impacted the range of available research directions. The findings can be used as a guide for policymakers to understand the potential consequences from TSF failures and may inform the development of policy interventions. Despite the data availability limitations, the thesis presents a tool and methodology for mining stakeholders to prepare first-order assessments and prioritization of facilities within a portfolio or region of interest, as well as the flexibility to evaluate specific elements of concern.

Text

2024-03-15

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87582

Mining Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/