RCC Represents at United Nations Conference in SLC

Mining has long been perceived as the enemy of sustainability. It is, after all, the extraction of finite resources from the Earth. Yet there is another rather paradoxical truth: without mining there can be no sustainable development. Most of us in the industry understand this, but there is a massive gap in public perception between the global vision for sustainability and what it will actually take to get there. We have a responsibility to help bridge this gap, and that’s why we’ve spent the last seven years sharing our message with the government, academia, and local communities around the world.

This month, we hit a huge milestone and RCC was invited to present at the first-ever United Nations Academic Conference on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) here in Salt Lake.

Our message was simple. To achieve the UN’s global sustainable development goals, we will have to mine more than we ever have before. In general, renewables and other sustainable solutions of today require vastly more raw materials to produce than our current technologies, so the net-zero future we envision will demand an unprecedented amount of our natural resources. As we attempt this transition, it is also important to understand that sustainability is not simply an environmentalist movement. We have to preserve the quality and longevity of life that human advancement has given us, while we also support exponential population growth and lift millions of people up out of extreme poverty.

Mining is integral to all of this, but unfortunately widely overlooked. Mining supplies us with everything we need to survive in the modern world, and when done responsibly, it creates lasting economies with the potential to impact almost all of the UN’s 17 SDGs. So, though our goals may be widely accepted, what we lack is a plan. These are difficult problems to solve, but that’s what we humans do best. With a greater public understanding of mining’s role in the sustainability movement, we can attract more brilliant minds dedicated to our cause and achieve great things together.