A Mining Industry Sustainability Index: Experiences from Gold and Uranium Sectors

From a sustainable development perspective, companies have to incorporate new requirements into their business models. Taking into account, new societal challenges are conceptualized at the corporate level by the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). At the level of the mining industries, the expectations are much more important especially since the mining activity generates social impacts (creation of employment, but also prostitutions, child labor, precarious working conditions in the artisanal exploitations), environmental (pollution, noise pollution, loss of biodiversity) and economic ones (income increase, dynamism of the local economy, but the mining activity creates economic distortions such as the increase in the price of real estate, conflicts of land use). The net impact of mining activity is therefore sometimes difficult to measure. The tool most commonly used by companies subject to the CSR requirement is the Global Reporting Initiative. This standard tool cannot, however, account for the specificities of the mining sector or the singularity of the contexts. This chapter focuses on mining sector as a driver of local development by analyzing its contributions to key dimensions of sustainable mining sector. For needs of policy decision making, we suggest a composite Mining Industry Sustainability Index (MISI). The sensitivity and robustness analysis and the correlation tests with other well-known indicators, at the end of the chapter, prove the strength of the constructed index, namely the sustainability index of the mining industry.