Abstract:

The Global Industry Standard for Tailings Management requires that uncertainties due to climate change be included in the knowledge base for every tailings storage facility. The quantification of risks and uncertainties of climate change requires a deliberate approach to understanding, assessing, and responding to the potential impacts at a site-specific level. To effectively utilize numerical models to quantify climate change risk, a site must first evaluate and select the relevant climate change scenarios to be modelled. In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued the Working Group I report: Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis. This presentation will highlight some of key findings of this report and resulting considerations that should be included in numerical models for tailings and mine rock storage facilities. A methodology will be presented on how to relate the five core Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenarios (SSP) to the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios, and how to select and apply the appropriate scenario at the site-specific level to understand both probability and consequence for each scenario at a given site. A common approach to determining climate change risk is to apply general circulation models (also known as global climate models). Global climate models provide insight on a regional scale but are often too coarse to account for local climate phenomena such as orographic effects. This presentation will use several case studies to demonstrate the development and application of long-term climate databases to statistically evaluate climate model outputs and present an approach to downscaling global climate models to be applicable at the site-specific level. These forecasts can be applied to site-wide water balance modelling to determine an appropriate risk management framework for each site and facility. By combining the likelihood for various climate outcomes with the severity of potential consequences, risk-based design and management criteria can be developed to inform the required knowledge base.

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Joel Steeves

Biography