The Challenge
As part of our client’s risk management and responsible business conduct, they perform regular audits on their suppliers from a sustainability perspective. The baseline for the audits is their business partner’s code of conduct which includes several social and environmental requirements.
The mine of this project is one of our client’s suppliers and has been involved in different socio-environmental incidents in recent years.
Our client required additional trusted information on the historical and current status of the mine. GlobalTrust’s space technology can provide regular and accurate snapshots into the status and activity of the gold mine to support our client in carrying out ongoing auditing in line with the challenges.
Our Solution
We delivered satellite-derived insights across three challenge areas to support our client’s due diligence process. Those areas and the outputs addressed were:
- Environmental and biodiversity degradation: Identifying the presence of deforestation and broader vegetation degradational linked to mining activities (regulated or unregulated)
- Human rights: Identifying changes in the infrastructure surrounding the mine, such as the creation of new temporary settlements, changes to the state of public roads, and the condition (stability) of bridges and other public infrastructure. These changes can indicate, e.g. possible illegal mining or sabotage that can create security breaches or incidents.
- Water quality : Deriving key water quality parameters, such as turbidity, chlorophyll-a or water colour, to indicate the presence of anthropogenic pollution.
