A multi-criteria evaluation of water management for sustainable development in mining

Mining is a water intensive activity. Mining companies are expected to bear responsibility for their impacts on water resources. Mine water management is a significant issue for sustainable development to maximise shareholder's value, secure production, and minimize environmental impacts. The identification of sustainable mining water management practices is technically challenging because of the lack of scientific tools available to evaluate optimal decisions. The paper proposes a multi-criteria evaluation method that aims at selecting reasonable water management practices for sustainable development in mining. The method is based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) together with a technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). Water must be managed at all stages of the life cycle of mining operations. However, the focus in this paper is the evaluation of mine water management practices at the mine operating stage. A decision hierarchy and a criterion set for assessing sustainability of mine water management were proposed, and used to evaluate management practices in six coal mines in the Bowen Basin. The AHP method was used to determine the weights of evaluative criteria. The ranking of the mine water management practices was calculated with the fuzzy TOPSIS method. The evaluation results illustrate the usefulness of the proposed method in identifying leading mine water management practices. Finally, some management implications were derived from the work to improve water management towards a more sustainable mining industry.