Diego Murguía is a junior research fellow and PhD candidate at the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. After graduating as Geographer he worked as consultant in the performance of Social and Environmental Impact Assessments of large-scale mining projects in Argentina. Greatly interested in sustainable management of minerals, he completed a MSc on Sustainable Resource Management at the Technical University of Munich and wrote a master thesis out of which appears this book.
Sustainability reporting under the GRI framework has emerged as a new institution seeking to provide transparency but sometimes sustainability reports seem to hide more than they reveal. This book addresses the case of Bajo de la Alumbrera mine in Argentina and its sustainability report from 2009.
All large-scale mining operations create noteworthy impacts at the local scale and many become sources of manifold socio-environmental conflicts around the world. Reporting under the GRI framework has emerged as a new institution seeking to provide transparency into the mining business but sometimes sustainability reports seem to hide more than they reveal, particularly related to critical arguments. This book addresses the case of Bajo de la Alumbrera, an open cut mine in Argentina and its sustainability report from 2009. It argues that if mining operations are to become an honest driver of sustainable development, reporting and stakeholder engagement practices need to improve by further consideration of critical stakeholders' arguments and by implementing more trade-offs between profits and the socio-environmental conflictive issues described by them.
