By Jeffrey Berger and Shyam Sundaram

From March 1–3, we had the chance to attend PDAC, one of the largest mineral exploration and mining conventions in the world. Despite doing a lot of work in this space, it was our first time attending the conference and we found it to be a truly instructive, eye-opening and rewarding experience. From our few days there – and through many of the side conversations we had – we walked away with a few reflections on how we should be thinking about sustainability in mining. 

Mining is catching up on sustainability literacy. But the gap is still wide where it matters most. 

Walk the Investor Exchange booths and you’ll be genuinely impressed. Operators can tell you ore grades, extraction curves, and capex projections to the decimal. Ask many of them about their relationship with surrounding communities, whether they’ve faced or anticipate social conflict, or how they’re managing environmental risk amid changing climate and regulatory conditions, and the fluency shifts fast. “Great community relationship.” “Minimal impact.” Or even: “Yeah, it’s been a bit of a challenge with the community. But it always comes down to money, right?” 

Actually, it does come down to money, but not in the way they mean. Social conflict can cost a world-class mining project (with capex of $3–5 billion) roughly $20 million per week in delayed production value. These aren’t soft risks but balance sheet risks. The industry won’t close the sustainability gap until it stops treating community relations as a communications issue and starts treating it as a core risk management and value creation function.

The sustainability and impact community is playing catch-up with mining. Why aren’t more people showing up?  

Several development finance institutions, foundations, and impact-oriented actors we’d expect at a conference of this scale and strategic importance were simply not there. Some who were present described navigating real internal tension. Within many impact organizations, there remains deep discomfort associating with a sector whose record on communities and ecosystems is uneven at best. For others, the broader backlash against ESG itself has made some sustainability-oriented engagement feel risky. The result is a kind of paralysis, and it’s costing the field influence it cannot afford to give up. 

There were dedicated sustainability and indigenous programming tracks at PDAC, which is meaningful. But they still felt like side discussions at a conference where the main stage conversations are about capital, geology, and geopolitics. That needs to change. With mining underpinning the energy transition and future economy, impact actors who opt out of that conversation aren’t protecting their values as much as they’re ceding ground. 

Despite the headlines about investment and political commitment, financing across the mining value chain remains tight. 

In conversations across the conference floor, this financing gap came up repeatedly. The policy ambition is real and the numbers aren’t small. Governments across North America, Europe, and Australia have committed billions to critical mineral strategies, and private capital has followed. But a closer look reveals a significant mismatch between where capital is flowing and where it’s actually needed most. 

Most of the money is flowing to large, late-stage projects and established majors with the balance sheets to ride out long timelines and price swings. According to the International Energy Agency’s 2025 Global Critical Minerals Outlook, investment momentum actually weakened in 2024, with spending growing just 5% (down from 14% the prior year), while exploration activity plateaued and start-up funding slowed. The junior explorers doing most of the discovery work sit largely outside those capital flows. On Canada’s venture exchanges, over 80% of publicly traded resource companies are exploration-focused, with average market caps around $5 million, yet they carry the exploration risk that feeds the entire pipeline. Meanwhile, as the Peterson Institute’s Cullen Hendrix has argued, the US and its allies are essentially trying to solve a strategic infrastructure problem using tools designed for private capital markets, creating a structural mismatch between what the market expects and what the geopolitical moment requires.  

Government loan programs are not enough to close the gap. Development finance and impact capital need to show up early, in the right jurisdictions, with financing structures that match the actual risk profile of the work. 

Mining closure is where finance and sustainability most urgently need to meet. 

If the first lifecycle of mining is extraction, the second and third are the management of remaining minerals and the redevelopment of sites into nature-positive landscapes and new economic assets. These stages sit under what the industry calls Asset Retirement Obligations (AROs), the financial and operational responsibilities companies carry to close, remediate, and steward mine sites long after production ends. The scale is enormous. Environmental reclamation costs for 24 major mining companies reached $72 billion in 2023. According to Moody’s, at their current growth trajectory (18% CAGR since 2018), these obligations could exceed the industry’s total outstanding debt by 2033. For Rio Tinto, closure provisions already stand at $17.2 billion — roughly 32% of its 2023 revenue. Communities have a much simpler way of describing this dynamic: “you get the gold, we get the shaft.” Too often, closure planning happens late, is underfunded, and treated as a compliance exercise rather than a design challenge. 

But the next frontier for mining is precisely here: recovering remaining and critical minerals from legacy sites, and transforming former mines into nature-positive and economically productive landscapes. To do this well, we need more actors willing to step into the second and third lifecycles of mining. But they need clearer liability protections so that innovators and redevelopment partners aren’t inheriting decades of environmental risk. At the same time, the industry needs much better closure planning from the start, integrating rehabilitation and future land use into mine design to reduce the long-term cost and complexity of AROs. Far from being the end of mining, closure is where the next generation of value will be created or lost.  

The technology on display was genuinely exciting, with real implications for sustainability. But adoption moves slowly. 

AI-powered exploration tools, autonomous haulage and operating machinery, real-time emissions monitoring, predictive maintenance systems with measurable safety and efficiency gains, digital twins that enable mining operators to predict and better manage key natural risks, like flooding, wildfires, etc. For example, Stanford’s Mineral-X program, in partnership with KoBold Metals, made headlines in recent years as AI tools they jointly developed helped identify a high-grade copper resource in Zambia’s Copperbelt, dramatically reducing the drilling needed to resolve geological uncertainty — a preview of how machine learning could compress exploration timelines and reduce surface disturbance at the same time. 

Another example of an exciting company we encountered was Volt Carbon Technologies, which is working on an innovative approach to graphite processing. Conventional graphite beneficiation relies on flotation methods that consume large volumes of water, use chemical reagents, and generate significant emissions. Volt Carbon’s patented air classification technology does away with all of that, using precision-controlled airflow to separate graphite from impurities. The result, independently verified by ProGraphite GmbH, is up to 98% purity with a process that cuts greenhouse gas emissions by up to 99% compared to traditional methods, and uses virtually no water. For an energy transition that depends on responsibly sourced North American graphite supply, that kind of process-level innovation matters enormously. 

That said, adoption remains slow. Mining is a capital-intensive, risk-averse sector, and many operators still default to proven processes over unproven ones, even when the sustainability and efficiency case is strong. The technology is there. The challenge is moving from proof of concept to industry norm. 

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We left PDAC more convinced than ever that mining will shape whether the energy transition succeeds or fails. Not just technically or financially, but on the questions that matter most: who benefits, who bears the risk, and whether sustainability is treated as the main stage or a side track.