The two largest disturbances mining presents which requiring addressing are disturbances to the water balance and energy balance; both of which will be influenced by climate change.
This paper presents a framework to incorporate climate change into mine closure planning from a risk perspective, as risk management will be a key component in decision making for mine closure designs. The newest Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) emission scenarios allow for ranking climate change outcomes from “very likely” to “less likely” to occur. By combining the likelihood of occurrence for various climate outcomes with the magnitude of the potential failures, a risk based design criteria can be developed for each closure component. This paper will focus on cover systems as closure technology to illustrate application of the framework presented in this paper.