Sustainable management in extractive industries
In order to foster more, but sustainable mineral production in the EU, SUMEX (SUstainable Management in EXtractive industries) will establish a sustainability framework for the extractive industry in Europe. It does so by considering the Sustainable Development Goals, the European Green Deal, as well as EU Social License to Operate considerations and will involve stakeholders from industry, government, academia and civil society backgrounds from all across the EU. This framework is then applied across the extractive value chain to analyse the mineral, as well as relevant economic, environmental and social policy frameworks of the EU, member states and selected regions along five focus areas - socio-economic and environmental impact assessments, land use planning, health and safety, reporting official statistics and permitting processes/policy integration-to find, or build, where needed, good practices or tools for an open access toolkit, which will be embedded in a broader Community of Practise (CoP) and which forms the basis for capacity building. This CoP will consider relevant stakeholder groups, with a focus on permitting authorities, across the EU, providing a digital platform and using a series of workshops and webinars.
In SUMEX, the experience from other projects like MINGUIDE, MINLAND, MIREU, STRADE builds a powerful foundation for addressing the challenge of how best to implement sustainability considerations into the whole raw materials value chain.
What makes SUMEX stand out, is that a) it involves Andalusia as a regional partner to act as 1) a test case and 2) to involve other regions, i.e. those represented in MIREU and the OECD Mining Regions and Cities Initiative, to participate in SUMEX; as well as having access to the informal network of mining authorities and b) by employing two practical use cases, involving industry partners, for two important and completely different raw material groups – construction and battery materials.