The Last Mile in Climate Risk: Where Screening Ends and Decisions Begin

By Suzanne Davis-Hall

April 15, 2026
Most mining companies have done some form of physical climate risk assessment by now. The pressure from TCFD, ISSB and investor expectations has seen to that. In mining, that has translated into a lot of activity, but not always into assessments that help people on the ground make better decisions.

What exists today tends to fall into one of two buckets.

The first is portfolio screening. A provider runs site coordinates through a global hazard model and produces a colour-coded map or a table of relative risk scores. These tools were built for financial institutions evaluating exposure across hundreds of assets, and they work at that scale. They do not work when a site team needs to understand what a changing precipitation regime means for their tailings facility, or whether their haul road drainage is designed for the rainfall intensities they will see in fifteen years. 

The second is a custom study. A consultant spends significant time – weeks to months – on a single site, producing a detailed report covering hydrology, geotechnical stability, structural loading, and other disciplines. It answers specific technical questions very well, but it is rarely available for every site in a portfolio. They are also expensive and not a realistic option for most companies below the top tier.

Between these two sits a wide gap.

What the Gap Looks Like in Practice

Consider a mid-tier producer with three or four operating sites. The corporate environmental team (or more likely the corporate risk team) has a portfolio screening result that tells them which sites have “high” exposure to certain hazards. But when the VP Operations asks what that means for capital planning at a specific site, the screening does not have an answer. The hazard scores do not connect to infrastructure. They do not account for what the site has already done. A site in a high-precipitation zone with well-designed drainage based on recent rainfall data is in a fundamentally different position to a site in the same zone relying on design storm assumptions developed in 2015.

The screening tool cannot distinguish between these two situations. It was never designed to.

Meanwhile, commissioning custom studies across three or four sites is still a significant exercise — in terms of cost and time. So the gap persists, and the corporate team continues to report screening-level results that satisfy disclosure requirements but do not support operational decisions.

Filling the gap

We have developed and are refining a self-serve tool that produces climate risk assessments at the infrastructure level — tailings, pit, roads, water, power, workforce, and closure. The output connects specific climate projections to specific site conditions and identifies where vulnerabilities and gaps in preparedness exist. The methodology is transparent and technically grounded, providing information that is sufficiently robust for internal decision-making without requiring specialist input at the screening stage, while recognising that detailed engineering studies remain necessary where material risks are identified.

Initial testing  at an operating Canadian gold mine identified infrastructure vulnerabilities the site team was already managing but had not connected to climate projections, and flagged others that were not on the radar at all.

Is that level of detail useful to your company? If so, we would welcome a conversation.