Quantifying Corporate Biodiversity Footprints in Global Mining

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Abstract
Mining provides essential raw materials but is an increasingly important driver of biodiversity loss. Global mining assessments have mapped mining-driven ecosystem degradation at unprecedented resolution, but linking these impacts to the companies driving them remains challenging. Here, we develop a tractable framework that combines satellite-derived mining land use, geolocated asset-level data, and ecological data to trace mining in protected areas and mining-driven species extinction risks from individual mines to their corporate owners, and estimate the biodiversity footprints of thousands of mining companies worldwide. Mining threats to biodiversity concentrate in the Global South and Australia, with a substantial share driven by North American, Western European, and East Asian corporations, whose overseas biodiversity footprints often exceed those of their home countries' mining sectors by orders of magnitude. In Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, these threats concentrate in countries with weak resource governance, compounding the risk of irreversible natural capital loss with little contribution to local development. Extinction risks are highly concentrated within the mining sector, as certain companies hold projects in some of the most biodiversity-rich and threatened regions on Earth. Comparing our footprint estimates with disclosure-based indicators suggests widespread underreporting of these impacts in the mining sector. Our study demonstrates that coupling global mining assessments with asset-level data can greatly reduce these information asymmetries and enhance corporate accountability.

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