Examining reported company commitments to water stewardship: Working beyond the mine?

Mining company commitments to ‘water stewardship’ are a relatively recent development to address corporate water issues. The peak mining industry body, the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), has incorporated commitments to water stewardship in its established framework for members. The ICMM requires members to ‘implement water stewardship practices that provide for strong and transparent water governance’ (ICMM, 2023c, principle 6.2). The purpose of this paper is to explore the scope of corporate water stewardship activities that mining companies report and reflect on the role of mining companies in this context. This research has implications for mining companies in respect of appropriate corporate water stewardship activities. Broad findings of this study are that while ICMM members appear to embrace details around operational water management, reporting of off-tenure activity relating to collaboration and ‘providing water governance’ is more complex. This study finds that requiring companies to ‘provide water governance’ beyond the mine would seem to be problematic, in that not all companies actively demonstrate this, and it is somewhat at odds with the generally accepted role of government agencies in water governance. We recommend that the ICMM commitment to ‘provide strong and transparent water governance’ could be improved by rewording the commitment to be instead to ‘contribute to strong and transparent water governance’, or alternatively, for ICMM members to provide ‘strong and transparent internal water governance’.