Finnish mining association adopts Canadian CSR initiative

TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – The Finnish Mining Association (FinnMin) will adopt the Mining Association of Canada’s (MAC's) Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) initiative, a corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme developed to improve environmental and social practises in the mining industry.

This was the first time TSM had been adopted by a mining association outside of Canada. The agreement was inked at the biannual Fennoscandian Exploration and Mining Conference (FEM) being held at Kittilä, Finland.

The MAC said FinnMin and many of its member companies chose TSM, as it was the most advanced initiative in the mining industry. TSM would contribute to the transparency and accountability of the mining industry and would, therefore, enhance social acceptance among the different stakeholders in Finnish civil society.

“TSM has proven its effectiveness in Canada and we at FinnMin believe it will be a useful tool for Finnish mining companies when the companies develop their sustainability reporting in the future,” FinnMin chairperson Markus Ekberg commented.

FinnMin’s adoption of TSM was part of a larger commitment by MAC to freely share TSM with other countries seeking tools to improve the environmental and social performance of their mining industries, including engagement with civil society and enhanced transparency and accountability.

“We are very pleased that FinnMin has, after a three-year multistakeholder process of its own that explored options for improving its mining sector's performance, has chosen TSM. This is a significant milestone for TSM and could be the start of it becoming a global standard,” MAC president and CEO Pierre Gratton stated.

Alan Young, a member of the MAC's community of interest advisory panel noted that FinnMin’s adoption of the TSM framework presented a great opportunity to share the many lessons learned from more than a decade of building standards in Canada.

Finland had already taken a key step in the implementation of TSM, after it created the Finnish Network for Sustainable Mining.

“The agreement between FinnMin and MAC is good news for the Finnish Network for Sustainable Mining. It represents the first step in the implementation of a new sustainability standard in the Finnish mining sector. I trust that most mining companies will join the standard within the next few years,” the network’s secretary general Eero Yrjö-Koskinen noted.

FinnMin represented 45 members, who employed about 5 000 staff in the country.

In Canada, the TSM initiative required mining companies to perform yearly assessments of their facilities' performance against 23 indicators under six areas, or protocols, including tailings management, Aboriginal and community outreach, biodiversity conservation management, energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions management, safety and health and crisis management planning.

Trained third-party verifiers then externally verify the results every three years to ensure the reported results are accurate. All facility-level results are published each year in a TSM Progress Report.

The MAC said FinnMin would have the ability to tailor the TSM initiative so that it reflected the unique aspects of its domestic mining sector and the expectations of its stakeholders and communities of interest.