First meeting: tba

PIs:
Victor Maus
Arildo Dias

iDiv member:
Carsten Meyer

Project summary:
The rapid shift towards renewable energy systems, digitalisation, urban expansion, and infrastructure development has significantly increased the demand for mineral resources, threatening biodiversity-rich regions. Despite evident spatial correlations, the causal links between mining and ecosystem changes remain poorly understood. sDETERMINE aims to address this gap by synthesising state-of-the-art spatial datasets and quasi-experimental causal analysis to infer the direct and indirect effects of mining on ecosystem changes globally and understand its environmental, social, economic, and financial implications. To comprehensively assess these effects, we will leverage spatial data on mining land use, corporate-level data, and long-term ecosystem condition metrics. Our methodology encompasses two levels of analysis: i) examining the impacts of individual mines and ii) the whole mining sector within countries and globally. We will use statistical models with causal path diagrams to address problems of unmeasured confounding variables and incorporate several controls for these variables. sDETERMINE will bring together 14 collaborators from 10 countries, ensuring diverse perspectives and complementary expertise. Our planned activities include three working-group meetings to support synthesis research, which will produce three scientific articles: i) a methodology to quantify mining impacts on ecosystem extent, ii) a global assessment of the direct and indirect effects of mining on ecosystems, and iii) perspectives on policy, business, and financial implications of our findings. These outcomes will provide critical insights into how mining contributes to the decline of ecosystem diversity, inform public policies and global commitments and offer essential information for new sustainability reporting standards.

In person participants:
tba

Remote partcipants:
tba

Meeting report:
tba