Good Practice Guidance on HIA of Mining and Metals Projects

The International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) has just published its guidance on HIA. Click here to go ICCM news page.

IOM with the support of Martin Birley and Judith Ball - with peer review from Mark Divall, Ben Harris-Roxas, Francesca Viliani and Aaron Wernham - helped ICMM produce this guide.

A few of the interesting and innovative things in the guide that are worth highlighting are:

• It provides a developed and developing country perspective with a strong focus on social determinants.
• It advocates for the mainstreaming of iterative 'first look' in-house rapid HIAs that are undertaken by HSE teams during the early internal feasibility and planning stages of a project that are followed up with more formal external commissioned HIAs and ESHIAs.
• It incorporates a competency framework for commissioners to consider when recruiting HIA consultants.
• It develops a Hierarchy of Health Enhancement that sits alongside the existing Hierarchy of (Health Risk Mitigation) that is used in Occupational Risk Assessment and Environmental Impact Assessments/Environmental, Social and Health Impact Assessments for considering mitigation and enhancement measures.
• It highlights the link between occupational health risk assessment and (community) health impact assessment.

This guide is accompanied by a sister publication on Good Practice Guidance for Occupational Health Risk Assessment in the Mining and Metals Sector.