Impacts of climate change on the Greek mining industry: perceptions and attitudes among mining industry practitioners op
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(2020) 5:28
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Impacts of climate change on the Greek mining industry: perceptions and attitudes among mining industry practitioners operating in the Cyclades E. Mavrommatis1 · D. Damigos1 Received: 13 November 2019 / Accepted: 26 May 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The extractive industry plays an important role in Greece’s economy. Nevertheless, in years to come, Greek mining enterprises may face economic losses due to climate change. This study aimed, for the first time, to explore the perceptions and attitudes of Greek mining practitioners towards climate change, and to investigate existing and planned climate-change adaptation and mitigation actions. To this end, a bottom-up survey based on face-to-face interviews of key practitioners from all of the operational mines in the Cyclades region of Greece was conducted. According to the results, mining enterprises are already experiencing negative impacts of extreme weather events. The major vulnerabilities of these enterprises relate to the management of excess rainwater, strong winds, and unusually high or low temperatures. However, the adaptation actions implemented by the companies are not systematic or are not always labeled as such, while most of their mitigation actions are performed to improve energy efficiency and achieve better economic outcomes. Even though the mining sector perceives climate change to be a threat to its activities, it has not invested the resources required to adapt to the future climate. Further, scientific knowledge of this phenomenon is limited among mining practitioners. To this end, governments and institutional stakeholders should promote climate-change awareness and disseminate successful adaptative actions to increase the future resilience of the mining sector. Keywords Mining sector · Climate change · Perceptions · Attitudes
Introduction The first working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declares in its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) that the observed changes in the climate that are attributable to human activities are snow melting and
Communicated by Christos Giannakopoulos, Guest Editor. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s41207-020-00169-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * E. Mavrommatis [email protected] D. Damigos [email protected] 1
School of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Zografou Campus, 9 Heroon Polytechniou str., 157 80, Athens, Greece
reduced snow cover, permafrost thawing, increased air temperatures, rising sea levels, and more frequent temperature extremes, droughts, wildfires, intense precipitation episodes, flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other extreme weather events (Stocker et al. 2013). These phenomena affect the mining sector in many ways. Intense rainfall negatively affects mine geomorphology and drainage, causing issues such as stability problems with mine benches, was
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