Ms. Shaw is a geologist and hydrogeologist with 25 years in the mining and environmental industry. Prior to joining ERM, Jane worked for 17 years for Rio Tinto in Australia, Africa and Europe. Since joining ERM in 2012, Jane has been involved in surface and groundwater modelling and impact assessment, and contaminated land site investigation and remediation projects. Work in these fields has included modelling and field studies to determine potential impacts and mitigation measures related to geological, hydrogeological and hydrological aspects of mining, power infrastructure projects, oil and gas, and industrial operations, including catchment scale models, mineral waste management, oil spill modelling and integrated water management. Jane has developed regional water balances for mines in Guinea and Brazil and is currently working with Anglo American to implement the new ICMM water stewardship framework.
A catchment approach to water risk management and stewardship
Water is a strategic asset in mining and a growing source of risk to operations and threat to a facility or company’s social licence to operate.
These risks which go to the core of a company’s social licence to operate, are traditionally not assessed as part of a mine’s risk management process. Additionally as they are often outside the direct influence of the mine operators, longer term, more strategic options need to be considered by the mine in order to operationally manage these risks.
The benefit of using a catchment scale approach to analysing potential water-related risks is that in addition to considering potential impacts within the mine site boundary those outside the fence line can also be assessed. In this way risks caused by (or to the mine) as a result of effects within the wider catchment are considered.
ERM have developed methods to map significant current and future potential influences on water resources within the greater catchment and provide operators with interactive tools to predict the influence of external factors on their operations. The approach builds on the ICMM water stewardship framework methodology to incorporate an appropriate level of technical rigor so that the process is more than simply problem identification.