When the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management (GISTM) was introduced five years ago, it mobilised the mining industry to advance step-change improvements and alignment around tailings safety, governance and accountability.
Since then, mining companies have invested heavily in creating and filling designated roles and review boards, completing thorough failure and consequence analyses, documenting operational and monitoring practices, and reporting on conformance and performance.
These have been important steps in setting the foundations for what’s happening now and what’s coming next.
Across this year’s Tailings and Mine Waste (TMW), Tailings 25, and Canadian Dam Association (CDA) conferences, one message became increasingly clear: we have transitioned well beyond implementing foundational governance elements.
The industry is now grappling with more complex questions. For instance, how deeply should risk-informed thinking be embedded into design, operations, governance and decision-making?
And, perhaps more importantly, how do we ensure these systems work in practice? Together, these conversations point to a clear transition; the next era of tailings governance will be defined not by compliance or conformance, but by effectiveness.
A technical community advancing quickly
On the technical side, progress continues at an impressive pace. TMW showcased advances in constitutive modeling, probabilistic analysis, dam breach simulation and consequence characterisation.
Tailings 25 contributed cutting-edge research on stability analysis, dewatering technologies, material behaviour, closure planning and governance integration. The digital evolution is equally encouraging, with remote sensing, geophysics, and real-time monitoring accelerating our ability to actively detect, interpret and respond to change.
Although these studies span a wide range of topics, nearly all of them targeted a purpose of risk reduction, risk quantification, or just better risk understanding – all important elements of risk management, forming the analytical backbone of risk-informed practice.
Risk-informed decision-making lags
Despite these advances, the industry has not yet established consistent risk-informed decision-making (RIDM). This was most evident during the RIDM workshop at CDA, where mine owners, hydropower operators, engineers and regulators spoke candidly about the same persistent challenges.
One of the most repeated concerns was that, even with sound risk information, participants struggle to communicate effectively with executives, to prioritise dam upgrades, or justify long-term resilience investments within annual budget cycles. Risk information is just not reaching executives in a form that influences priorities or capital allocation.
Engineers identify failure modes, run probabilistic models and quantify risks; executives interpret risk through business priorities, exposure and reputation.
Regulators set compliance thresholds that differ widely across jurisdictions, influencing how organisations might perceive their minimum obligations. Communities frame risk through lived experience, trust and the potential consequences for their families.
As one participant put it, “Everyone is speaking clearly… just not in the same language.”
Another challenge is that many mining organisations are still grappling with risk tolerance. Internal risk standards differ across the industry and are being adapted in different ways to accommodate extreme-consequence, very low-probability scenarios.
When risk is not translated effectively, and without shared understanding of acceptable versus intolerable risk, misalignment persists across disciplines, business units and leadership layers.
As a result, decisions default to short-term priorities, value-driven projects and cost minimisation for waste management infrastructure. Even when high-consequence scenarios exist, they often fail to rise to the top unless communicated with real clarity and urgency.
The result is a maturity gap: we have high-quality risk information, but limited mechanisms to ensure it consistently informs decisions.
Why effectiveness is the next frontier
This is why the concept of effectiveness is so critical.
Compliance asks: Do we have the required systems?
Conformance asks: Are systems implemented? Are operators applying them as intended?
Effectiveness asks: Are these systems actually reducing risk? Does our performance influence decisions?
The next stage of tailings governance requires mining organisations to evaluate how well their systems actually function; to ask whether risk information reaches the right people at the right time, whether trigger-action-response-plans (TARPs) guide actions, whether operations, maintenance and surveillance (OMS) manuals are used as living documents, whether risk assessment results drive prioritisation and whether decisions align with risk tolerance.
It also asks whether executives truly understand the magnitude and implications of their risk exposures.
Scott Martens, Director, Tailings and Geotechnical Engineering at Teck, focused on this need in his TMW keynote. He emphasised that the GISTM is essential but insufficient, and that the next step requires evaluating the robustness, resilience, and adaptiveness of both facilities and governance systems.
These qualities cannot be mandated or audited into existence but instead must be weaved into tailings management culture. They require deeper reflection on uncertainty, variability, human behaviour, effects of cumulative change, and the realities of construction and monitoring fidelity. They also require more transparent communication, internally and externally.
Martens’ message resonated because many practitioners are already feeling this tension. The scaffolding of governance is in place, but its strength varies widely across industry.
And until organisations can measure and demonstrate the effectiveness of their controls, claims of non-credible failure modes or achievement of ‘as low as reasonably practicable’ (ALARP) remain aspirational rather than evidence-based conclusions.
The path forward
The first five years after the GISTM came into force were about building systems, structures and shared expectations. The next five must centre on evaluating and improving the effectiveness of those systems and embedding risk-informed decision-making into all lifecycle stages of mine developments.
This requires:
- a culture that encourages transparency, curiosity and continuous learning
- digging into understanding and managing the risks of human-related tendencies, uncertainty and variability
- enhancing mechanisms to assure the effectiveness of controls spanning the full hierarchy of controls
- clear, organisation-wide alignment on risk tolerance and language
- improving communications between technical specialists and executives, and
- explicit integration of risk understanding into decision making.
The mining industry’s technical capacity is strong and accelerating. The next advancement in practice depends on whether we can build governance systems that not only exist but truly work.
If the transition from compliance to effectiveness becomes our collective focus, the industry will be far better positioned to meaningfully reduce risk, not just document its management.
Continue the conversation… Karen Chovan is a leading specialist in tailings risk and governance, and the CEO and Founder of Enviro Integration Strategies Inc. With 25 years in the mining sector, she works with boards, innovation committees, and mine operators to strengthen oversight and improve decision-making for mine waste infrastructure. Karen leads the development of an industry-first software platform, CI-RiskDB, that evaluates the effectiveness of governance systems, supports risk-informed decision pathways, and helps companies meet—and demonstrate—conformance with global standards such as GISTM.
1 comment
john metzger
Karen is a trusted and respected colleague and peer contact in the dynamic arena of “TSF Awareness and Management. Too much emphasis is placed on the mechanics of compliance and management, and too little on the actual CONTENT of this process.
TSF awareness and evidence should be visible, tabular, graphic, and NRT. Anything less further constrains sharing and understanding across the practitioners and stakeholders communities. Perhaps that is how “miners” like it, but it is an extended disservice to staff, practitioners, and communities where a TSF is part of the neighborhood.