Sazani, heather@sazaniassociates.org.uk
Wales, UK
Monitoring, reporting, and responding to ESG issues is becoming an increasingly prominent conversation topic, not only within the extractives industry, but also in public discourse and policy. Combined with the challenges of a pandemic which limited travel and on-site work, alternatives have to be found to ensure that ESG issues are not neglected.
Land use and social context have been identified as two key antagonists of achieving a social licence to operate within the minerals and mining sector.
Satellite imagery and remote sensing, integrated with robust social data, can offer an innovative solution to mapping and visualising geographic and social risks, throughout the lifespan of the mine and beyond.
Sazani’s 3E Mapping Tool is an AI enabled, powerful, remote-sensing application for analysing environmental data, linking location information (where things are) with descriptive information (what things are) to provide a detailed classification of land types without site visits. The 3E is an invaluable application for supporting major projects to identify their impact on the environment and supporting engagement with stakeholders. The second tool, a Social License to Operate Index, developed through the H2020 INFACT project, assesses the potential of a project to achieve and or maintain a social licence.
Sazani is currently investigating how these two tools could be combined to present a GIS based online visual model that combines visual and numeric geo-social-spatial data to improve business social acceptability and communication of social licence to operate potential.
We will be presenting our vision , drawing on our research with the Akobo Gold exploration project in Southern Ethiopia to combine geospatial and ESG factors and how we envisage making connections between the two, to objectively measure ESG performance in a data-driven way, in turn adding value to the project.
Biography
Dr Heather De-Quincey (MIMM, FRGS) is a contaminated land scientist who specializes in mine reclamation and ecological restoration. Heathers previous work has been in the investigation and implementation of restoration schemes on challenging landscapes. Now, as Sazani’s Ecosystem Specialist, Heather combines field-based and remote-sensing data to assesses ecosystem change in the context of ESG. Heather will be presenting her post-doctoral research on ‘Determining changing geo-socio-spatial conditions’, which combines geographic and demographic data for the development of a visual SLO tool.
