Overview

The minerals industry in Australia faces serious challenges:

• declining ore grades
• increasing development costs
• difficulty attracting a skilled workforce
• improving health and safety standards
• minimising environmental impact.

It must do this while ensuring that the industry holds a ‘social licence to operate’ with the Australian public, and with the local communities with which it interacts.

Mining and sustainability

One of the Minerals Down Under Flagship strategic goals is focused on delivering national benefit and an ongoing license to operate for the Australian minerals industry through innovative solutions that cross business and discipline boundaries to reduce environmental impact and increase social dividend.

This Mineral Futures Collaboration Cluster enables the Flagship to focus a significant proportion of its research and development on achieving this goal.

Partners in world-class research

The cluster brings together researchers from the university sector and CSIRO to explore large and complex future sustainability issues in the minerals industry across regional, national and global scales.

The institutions bring in-depth knowledge about, and links into, a diversity of mining regions and communities in both the west and the east of Australia.

CSIRO’s partners in the cluster are:

• University of Queensland (Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining)
• Curtin University of Technology
• University of Technology, Sydney (Institute for Sustainable Futures)
• Australian National University
• CQUniversity.

In addition, researchers from Monash University will also provide key research inputs to the cluster through the University of Technology, Sydney.

Integration

A key priority of the cluster is to integrate research across cluster projects and with the broader CSIRO Mineral Futures program of research and the Minerals Down Under Flagship.

This will enable systematic comparative work to be undertaken on the sustainability challenges facing the sector across different regions and scales, and provide a shared context for developing and testing analytical frameworks and methodological tools.

It will also enable the Flagship to more easily adopt innovative methods to conduct research and development of new technologies.

Projects

The program of work consists of three integrated projects:

• Commodity Futures – investigating the macro-scale challenges, dynamics and drivers of change facing the Australian minerals industry through scenarios and monitoring of peak minerals.
• Technology Futures – investigating the potential social and environmental impacts of, and community responses to, innovative new technologies being developed through the Minerals Down Under Flagship.
• Regional Futures – addressing the inter-linkages between social and economic impacts of new mining technologies at a regional level emphasising land use change in sensitive environmental settings. 

A collaborative funding model

The partnership will receive A$3.17 million from CSIRO’s Flagship Collaboration Fund with in-kind contributions from cluster partners bringing the total investment in the research to A$8.63 million (net of GST) over three years.