Mining and the Sustainable Development Goals: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

193 United Nations members are signatories of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Even though it does not make it legally binding to the country members, the SDGs establishment incites national and managerial frameworks to achieve the SDGs. The mining industry inserts itself in this context by its global presence and frequent location within ecologically sensitive and less developed areas. This paper aims to consolidate the state of academic research on mining, sustainability and sustainable development, by organizing the results of previous studies within a systematic review on the SDGs set. To do so, the ISI Web of Science TM Core Collection database was chosen as a database of record, as it is one of the most widespread databases of academic journals. We have used all years available in the ISI database, from 1945 to 2016 (for complete years). The systematic review process comprised of five steps: (i) to search terms [("sustainability" or "sustainable development") and mining] on the database and to apply filters of criteria; (ii) organizing papers; (iii) metrics and relations between papers and authors; (iv) classification of the results through content analysis techniques; and (v) synthesis. The results were divided in two groups: the highly cited and the most recent papers, to include papers that have academic impact and those which show the newest contributions to the field. The results showed that, in spite of a growing amount of publications in the past years that relates to mining and sustainability, the main focus of these publications are still on the environmental dimensions of the UN goals. This suggests that more practical and academic work in the mining sector are required to fill in the blank spaces regarding the other set of goals that compose the SDGs framework.

Two Decades of Bibliometric Research in Indonesia

“…The LCS group shows more relationships between works. The study by Mesquita et al showed The LCS graph has more relations between works than the GCS graphs (Mesquita et al, 2017). The work of Nandiyanto (node 40) is an authority article and is used by other research as a theoretical basis in research on publications of chemistry and materials in universities.…”

A Review of Conventions, Protocols, and Agreements: Importance of Sustainable Mining in Achieving Sustainable Development Goals

“…According to the imperative analysis of [33] and [34] Mining, processes have the ability to affect a wide range of environmental entities. They are of interest to a diverse range of stakeholder clusters, so there is plenty of room for the industry to become more sustainable.…”

Determination of Underground Mineable Reserve with Regard to Metal Price Uncertainty and Sustainable Development

“…A review of studies on sustainable development in mining may be found in (Asr et al, 2019;Gorman & Dzombak, 2018). Limited researches are about quantifying the sustainable development attributes (Amirshenava & Osanloo, 2019;Fernandes de et al, 2017). In addition, the limited research that addresses all three principles of sustainable development in mining is not about determining underground mine layout.…”