‘Pulling all stops' on climate change

The UN’s recent report on the impact of human beings on planetwide temperatures is a call to action for miners.

- David McKay

The view of mining executives polled by finweek is that a discussion about reducing greenhouse gas emissions can’t exclude the rights of people in poorer economies, especially in Africa.

“Scientists are looking at just one component,” says Mark Bristow, CEO of Barrick Gold, one of the world’s largest gold producers. “But are we going to deny the development of mankind? If you do, you will compound the problem,” he said in an interview with finweek in August. Climate change is humanity’s most profound challenge but a lack of development in undeveloped economies will also cost lives.

Climate change has long been an emotive topic in the mining sector, as it has broadly in society; probably ever since the Paris Agreement of 2016 that committed some of the world’s most industrialised economies to containing global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels. But the debate kicked up a notch following the publication on 9 August of a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, described as “epochal”.