Harmful Impacts of Mining

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The harmful impacts of mining remain a challenge for society to acknowledge and address. Sustainability reports tend to focus on how responsible companies are at creating positive contributions and managing ESG risks. And the term ‘ESG risks’ has become a euphemism for the potential harmful impacts of mining. In the context of the energy transition, industry actors now refer to ‘green’ mining, and mining as a ‘future-enabling’ industry. Yet harmful impacts of mining persist, and it is necessary to name the risks for what they are: harmful to people, environments and economies of producing countries when prevention fails.

Based on public domain information (see document library below), the report Harmful Impacts of Mining: when extraction harms people, environments and economies shows that harmful impacts are not inevitable, and yet they happen across the world, not only in jurisdictions with limited regulatory oversight. The report calls for the normalisation of prevention of harmful impacts across the industry.

Watch the replay of our webinar on Harmful impacts of mining (in English):


With speakers from RMF, ICMM, IndustriALL Global Union, MiningWatch Canada, ICoCA, and Vedanta Resources.

Major impacts identified in the study

How to read this chart: The terms shown in the word cloud include only those impacts identified in the study and are therefore necessarily limited to cases reported as specific incidents. Other impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions or gradual pollution from acid mine drainage, are not included as these are rarely reported as standalone incidents within a given timeframe.

Scope of the study

This report presents the results of RMF’s recent study on harmful economic, environmental, social and governance (EESG) impacts associated with a sample of 38 large mining companies (i.e., those included in the RMI Report 2020). These companies together account for approximately 28 per cent of global mining production, collectively covering 18 home countries, 55 producing countries and about 1,000 mining sites worldwide.

Document Library

This searchable document library includes approximately 260 reports of incidents of harmful impacts, which have been identified during the study. Many of these reports cover multiple incidents. It is possible to search for a specific text in the titles, companies, and subjects using the field below. Each report summarises the data and lists the original sources of information (450+ items sourced from the public domain) which can be downloaded.

Other resources

→ Conflict Prevention Tool (2021)
by CIDP-Queen’s University, ICRC, DCAF, and AngloGold Ashanti