Topic: “Planning for Climatic Uncertainty: Implications for Mine Closure and Long Term Stewardship” - Scott D. Warner, Ramboll USA

 Climatic uncertainty creates challenges for mines and the long-term obligations to protect environmental conditions and to maintain important structures for perhaps thousands of years. Management strategies and infrastructure/containment systems that were designed with reference to the current or historical climate must be developed to perform under future scenarios of extreme weather events or radical climatic shifts, and thus must rely on still developing models and analysis. Our work in North America and Australia, for example, has shown that quantification of the duration, occurrence interval, and intensity of future events is relevant to the risk analyses of critical components, with the most common way of adapting to climate change being the alteration of design standards for key structures.  This presentation was initially presented to the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration (SME) and provides an overview of our work to illustrate key developments