Looking Ahead - Mining and the Environment: From Ore to Metal - page 852

22.3 ON AND BEYOND THE HORIZON - GLOBAL
CHANGE AND CHALLENGES
This i nal section attends to the future and the impact of some aspects of a rapidly chang-
ing world already bearing down on the international mining industry, heavily drawing on
personal communication with and on a forthcoming paper by Jim and Helen Singleton
(2008 - in press). A critical factor underlying the following discussion, an underlying
theme in this text, is the increasing trend towards the exploration and development of
exploitable mineral resources in sometimes difi cult parts of the world.
As discussed earlier in this chapter, this inevitably means undertaking operations in
more challenging physical environments, e.g. deep ocean sea-bed sites such as currently
planned north of the coastline of PNG; extreme climatic zones such as the case of the
Ekati diamond mine in Northern Canada; or more isolated geographic locations such as
West Papua, home of Freeport's Grasberg Copper and Gold Mine. It also means operating
in more unstable and difi cult nations and political settings. Mining companies are prob-
ably better equipped than most other industry sectors to meet these types of challenges, but
difi cult geography is only part of the range of changes and challenges facing the mining
sector. Increasingly, challenges of a different nature are emerging.
An Increasingly Challenging Global Operating Environment
Global shifts in the world economy are evident. Until recently, industry, including mining,
has evolved to some extent in the perception of a simplistic 'bi-polar' model of the global
economy where western business management practices and diplomacy dominate, and are
assumed as the template for development in the rest of the world. This is not happening.
Clearly, the global economy is not so simple; rather, it is fast becoming 'multi-polar', with
massive wealth streaming in from the OECD economies, USA and Europe in particular,
to the leading performers of the developing world, particularly China and India, but also
to many other rising nations. In addition, increasing numbers of developing economies
are shifting from being passive recipients within the global economy to becoming active
shapers.
Along with these shifts, three powerful trends have emerged: (1) the power of infor-
mation and communication technologies (or 'infosphere' as discussed in a later section);
(2) the rising economic openness; and (3) the expanding size and reach of global
corporations.
The rising power of the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China is well recog-
nized, but this is now extending rapidly to other countries particularly in North and South
East Asia, and Latin America. Recently, the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA)
economic group of nations has emerged as a growing force. With rising wealth comes
increasing inl uence on the way in which business occurs. This diversii cation is already
having, and will increasingly have, bearing on the western economy-based mining compa-
nies. Mining investors from different nations and cultures will play to different rules, thus
changing the traditional competitive landscape. The cultural assumptions underlying the
ethics, value systems and best practice notions of western-based companies will not nec-
essarily constrain new operators from new countries. Different assumptions imply doing
business on a different and negotiated basis to achieve satisfactory business outcomes with
new national governments in rising nations.