Chris Stockey Hello and welcome to this episode of the UNFC podcast. Today we are delighted to have with us several members from the United Nations Economic Commission of Europe or UNECE, the group that first developed UNFC to talk to us all about its application in the past, the development of it, how it’s being used in the modern, citing opportunities that have recently come about, and also potential opportunities for future application.

I’m gonna introduce the group in a moment. We’re really excited for this panel to really get that expert lens to the world of UNFC. We’re joined by Erika Ingvald, Hari Tulsidas Victoria Oliver, and Ghadi Sabra. Hari, we’ll come to you first. Would you mind maybe giving us a little bit of a background into yourself?

Hari Tulsidas Thank you Chris, and hi all. I’m very excited to be here today in this conversation about resources and how we are going to manage the planetary resources in the future. I am Hari Tulsidas. I’m coming from the UN Secretariat the UN Economic Commission for Europe. I spent most of my time at the fault lines between resources and society, where projects looks good, solid on paper, but they fail in the real world.

So what is open mis is viability that is decided by the geology or engineering, but whether the projects are acceptable to the people. So with this in mind, we have provided some non guidelines. We call it frameworks that can help countries and companies and projects to progress with their resource projects.

Chris Stockey Thank you so much, Hari, and we’re really looking forward to getting into all of that great detail with you soon. Erika, would you like to introduce yourself?

Erika Ingvald Yes. Thank you for having us. It’s fantastic what you’ve done and that you got to do this final podcast with all of us. We really appreciate that.

For me, I’m, I’ve been working with UNFC for the last 10 years, I think, but I’ve only been with the ECE for the last, a little bit over a year. But I used to work with it from, as a member state representative from Sweden, and I’ve been working with resources for the last 20 years before this. So it’s, it was really a, an “aha” moment for me when I realized the strength of UNFC and it, and I really, I’ve really appreciated working with it from a governmental perspective, but doing it for a number of governments now. It’s, I think it’s really rewarding and I think the people who are using those tools are also finding them more and more appealing.

Chris Stockey Thank you. So we’re delighted to have you, and I think it’s gonna be really exciting to get into that, if you want an expert opinion, somebody’s who’s used UNFC, not just for the ECE, but also with that governmental lens. And that’s what lots of people are struggling with, and we’ve heard throughout this podcast series, so can’t wait to get into that.

We’re also joined by Victoria Oliver would you like to say hello, and tell a little bit about yourself?

Victoria Oliver Hello everyone. Thank you for having me here. I’m also very happy to be here. So I’ve joined UNECE more or less. One year ago I started with an internship. Now I’m supporting the EGRM secretariat as a consultant and I’m a Master’s student in sustainability.

And I was able to do my master’s thesis and use UNFC and apply it in my Master’s thesis. So that’s a little bit about me.

Chris Stockey Awesome. Thanks Victoria. And I’m still excited one day to get to have a look at your thesis, having heard a lot about it as it was being developed. So that would be really cool to bring that sustainability lens.

Our final brilliant member of the UNECE team is Ghadi Sabra over to yourself.

Ghadi Sabra Thank you Chris, and thank you for the build up. Yes, I’m very excited to be here. Thank you for the invitation and for this very crucial talk, especially at this point in time. Yes, I come from a geological background, so I did geology with and then continued in mining engineering, and been helping or supporting the UNECE and Expert Group on Resource Management with the implementation and the deployment of UNFC in the European Union and now in Central Asia as well.

And one of the strongest suits that explored over this past period or working with UNFC, per se, is going beyond what geology tells us. And as Hari mentioned, it’s getting this bird eye view on how to develop these resource projects. And this is where UNFC comes in play. And we’ll unpack this further in the discussions, hopefully.

Chris Stockey Awesome. Thank you so much, Ghadi. And we are really looking forward to getting into that ’cause it aligns with a lot of the work that, we’ve been doing over the last few years as well. You can tell we are really excited for today because all three of the hosts of this podcast series have returned to be a part of it, which makes it quite the panel.

So just as a reminder of who we are, in case you haven’t listened to every single episode of this series. Over to the brilliant Alex Fuentes.

Alex Fuentes Thank you, Chris. I’m Alex. I’m a geologist by training, but my particular hook into UNFC was through geospatial data and data management and trying to see where all these complex moving parts interact with not only the geology, but with society and the greater whole of it.

Chris Stockey Brilliant. Thanks Alex. And over to yourself, Matt.

Matthew Grimshaw Hello everyone. I’m also a geologist. I’ve got about 10 years experience working in exploration from academia, so PhD looking at gold through to working with junior mining companies. And if I’m honest, I hadn’t really heard or come across UNFC.

It was all the world of CRIRSCO. And working with Tala more recently to bridge some of those sustainable outcomes of what we’re trying to do with resources and particularly with within the eu have learned a huge amount. And yeah, I think it’s a really engaging topic one that’s gonna be really significant.

Chris Stockey Brilliant. Thanks Matt. And I am Chris Stockey. I’m a climate change and nature consultant, the lead at sala. But my original foreign into the world of UNFC was through our involvement in the VECTOR Project where we got to work with Alex and Matt and a bunch of other wonderful people within the research world to look at the applicability and availability of data, to start looking at UNFC under that lens of the Critical Raw Materials Act.

Of course, that means now with that sustainability hat on, I’m very excited to talk to everybody here today about that lens and that E Axis point. We’re gonna run today a little bit as a panel, so I’m going to be your host, which means I hope you don’t get too nauseated by my voice. But we’ll be hearing expert opinions from everybody else throughout.

Hari, we’re gonna come to yourself first. And then everybody, of course, please feel free to join in. But we’re hoping you could give us a little bit of an overview of you UNFC’s aims and objectives and that global mandate perspective as well.

Hari Tulsidas Thank you, Chris. We are all technical people as seen from the introductions.

Mostly geologists working on resource project. But the strange thing is UNFC didn’t begin as a technical exercise. It began as a peace project. UNECE, the UN Economic Commission for Europe was born about 75 years back to rebuild Europe after the World War II, the second World War. And one of the major issues was availability of energy and resources.

At that time, the reconstruction was powered by coal, so UNECE looked into classifying coal, managing coal. Later, the Cold War came. Again, peace became a big question mark, the world was fractured between different factions, and they were thinking in different ways on how to manage resources. The Cold War ended somewhere in 1990s.

There was reconsolation, but two viewpoints remained whether we should have centralized planning of the resources or whether the market forces should drive resource management. UNFC was born to use both ideas together and bring some framework that would be acceptable to all, have a very good planning base, but also have the free market have it say, so the systems that were used in the former Soviet Union and in many other developing countries, and the western systems that were from at that time, which is mostly based around economic issues, they were totally brought into one system with three axes.

And this looked into viability of the projects from an economic point of view, but also from a technical point of view, and confidence of estimates or the uncertainty point of view. By the 2000s, things changed again, the world became more focused on environmental issues, climate issues, social issues, they came into the forefront.

So the UNECE decided to, again, pivot UNFC to include more aspects of social environmental aspects. By 2015, we had the Sustainable Development Goals, which were the roadmap for progress and development for the whole world, which was accepted by 193 countries across the world, UNFC, integrated alignment to SDGs into that.

And from being a project management system, it can be also a system to manage resources locally at provincial levels. It can be a system to manage assets across company levels. It can be a system that can be used by planners at national levels, and it can be a tool for speaking within a global sphere how one can talk in the same language with other in a new international order that is coming up.

UNFC effectively is a n Esperanto that allows easier communication between various countries, various sectors at various scales. So that is where UNFC is right now. It is applicable to all resources also, and it is minerals, petroleum, renewable energies, anthropogenic resources and so forth.

We think that, we have to build a communication system, and why not use the same jargon, the same standards, the same definitions when we are dealing with any other resources. So that is a philosophy that is leading UNFC today. It is an integrative system, it tries to bridge people and communities and sectors together.

Matthew Grimshaw Thanks, Hari. That I think for all of us that’s given us some useful historical context that I wasn’t aware of. So that’s really really appreciated. Is there anywhere which you see this being, like you hope the uptake is more applied with the UNFC, is there any sectors or areas you wish it would be more applicable in the future?

Hari Tulsidas Yeah. When you say future that word raises many opportunities. We came, I talked that we came from a world of coal when we moved into oil and gas. Now we are currently at the movement of transformation to mineral sector, and we see that going forward this can also change.

Hydrogen or new resources can come, which will be more relevant to the societies say 20 or 30 years from now. We are talking about deep geothermal energy. We are thinking about what are ways in which we can have resources and energy that are have the least carbon footprint.

It has got the least water footprint, it has got the least land footprint and all. The biggest issue today is the planetary boundaries are being breached by end of the century, we may need six planets to satisfy our needs. If you go in this fashion, we need more circularity. So there are a lot of ways in which the things are going to transform in the future.

We cannot forecast all of them now, but we only thing we can be sure is that the future will not be an average of what we had done in the past. It is going to be a new world in the future, and we think that UNFC should be ready and applicable to all that, all new resources that are going to be there.

Matthew Grimshaw That’s great, Hari. Thanks for that perspective. And Erika, I’ll come to you next if that’s okay. So one of the things I was keen to ask you, with your experience of working using UNFC for a long time, how have you seen the kind of uptake change over that time? Over that time, particularly for me, someone who’s seen this with the EU Critical Raw Materials Act, that’s how I’ve seen it, and that’s maybe why we’re seeing a much more prevalence of it. Could you maybe talk a bit about your experiences of it?

Erika Ingvald Yeah. So I when I started working with this, maybe 10 years ago, it was a tool that all of us who had started to learn about it were impressed by, but it wasn’t, it was applied in a number of countries, but not with that huge uptake that we see now.

So over the last year, and I think actually the global goals were a starting point when we started to understand what we need renewables and how are we going to create those renewable technologies? We are going to need minerals. So that was a starting point for this new development that we see.

And it was also, Hari mentioned a lot of the applications, but another thing that’s where it’s applicable is for underground storage for CO2 or hydrogen. And that’s also part of our future if we can store CO2 and catch it and store it. If we can store hydrogen, so we can use it for different processes like steelmaking, but also for energy purposes.

That’s also something we can use UNFC for and help classify projects so that we can get a national or regional or global overview. But when it comes to the uptick that’s going on now, I would say that the driver is the need for primary and secondary mineral resources for the green transition and other purposes like digitalization or other things.

And you have experience from EU and the Critical Raw Materials Act. I think that was a big success when we negotiated that we could include UNFC there for a few provisions so that, and this is also part of what Hari’s talking about with different countries having different systems. Some countries don’t have anything, and if you are in a union like the EU, you would like to have a harmonized way of understanding the resources within your territory.

So I think that was a huge step forward. And also the work that has been done by the African Union to develop AMREC-PARC that is totally based on UNFC and UNRMS. And Hari is much more of an expert on that, but it’s also huge uptake when whole continent chooses this system and start to work towards implementing it.

And what more Ghadi mentioned central Asia and other things going on now is that we are building up with partners all over the world. Centers for Excellence for Resource Management, for sustainable Resource Management. I don’t remember how many there are now, but there are a lot, and there are building capacity all the way from east to west basically.

At the moment it’s focused. So each center focused on what’s most needed for their region. But we also, we see a lot of uptake for the different needs or the different resources that UNFC can be used for. And something that I just, one more thing is that what I hear from companies who are starting to use UNFC now because they want to apply to become Strategic Projects. According to CRMA they tell me that they find these two, they know risco of course, and that’s what used to report for stock markets. But they also tell me that once they start to actually do the classifications, they find these tool very helpful for themselves to, to organize the information of their projects in a way that maybe they, of course they do have systems for that, but now they organize it in a way so that they see all the different pieces of the sustainability wheel, if you like. So I think that’s encouraging to hear.

Chris Stockey I think there’s so many strands to pull on there. Erika, I’ve got, I think I’ve been far back with a series about four different questions to you here. I think the first is you touched on, carbon storage and sequestration.

I’ve actually been on a call talking about this even this morning. So my first question is gonna be, are you seeing any areas or entities where people are applying this already to these sorts of new technologies? Hari, you also mentioned the likes of hydrogen. Are we seeing this or is this more kind of future aims?

Totally, see how this works and it’s about that circularity aspect. And then I think there’s a lot to touch on in that spread. Jurisdictionally as you’ve brought up. But also, as Erika, ’cause when we were talking about having this episode, we were discussing that I was on a panel last week, the Critical Minerals Association conference from the uk, which was all about that equal weighting to not just the geotechnical feasibility and the economics of that side of things, but how do we use the UNFC to get rid of those kinds of typical mining statistics that are one project in a thousand that come to fruition.

How do we make it so that it’s one in a hundred or one in 10, because we’re using things like the UNFC to recognize where things couldn’t necessarily progress. But first on that kind of future resources storage of sequestration of carbon hydrogen exploitation, for example. Are you seeing any examples of application already or is this more of a hoping that we can bring people to the party of UNFC?

Erika Ingvald We have a working group, focusing on underground storage. And they are looking into how this can be applied. One thing they discussed or are discussing is you are all well aware of EU regulations and there is another one called the Net Zero Industry Act. That’s an act that includes CO2 storage and it includes demands on reporting from the different member states about the capacity they might have in their countries to store CO2.

So that could that could be a tool for net zero to, to actually get a harmonized reporting on this. And then there you need to work out how you would like to define your projects and so on. But that’s an application I think, could be very helpful for the European Union, for instance, I don’t know if Hari or Ghadi or Victoria want to add more for hydrogen, for instance.

Ghadi Sabra Maybe I can jump in. And this also goes beyond what hydrogen or other resources are. Another way to approach UNFC is also with this integrated system thinking. So also crossing beyond minerals, raw materials, oil and gas injection projects, et cetera, into water and even food discussions.

So going beyond these conventional economic indicators or matrix to better understand how UNFC can further support, these well at current times, not very critical, but will become critical in a decade or even more so yes, applying everything together here, UNFC supports and reducing these complex information, again, into their simplest form and allowing decision making based on not only, again, economic factors, but going beyond that into sustainable environmental stewardship social impacts, et cetera.

Chris Stockey And I think this is where, from a Satarla perspective, this is where we’ve really enjoyed getting into this conversation ’cause it really align with our kind of network based approach to, to risk management and that horizon scaling scenario element, which is, it’s not just about the now and it’s not about what happened in the past, it’s about that systems level integration long into the future and as you say, with all of that sustainability element.

So Absolutely, thank you so much. I think the other element we touched on here was that jurisdictional spread and you talked about, the Centers for Excellence Erika, we’ve had members of the UK version appear on the podcast previously. It’s really great to see their insight on how that spun up.

But Ghadi, I know that we talked in the introduction about kind of those, that scalability and your involvement in areas of Asia, et cetera. Is there anything that you wanted to add in that direction?

Ghadi Sabra On scalability, again, just going back to point 0 and how UNFC was built, of course, on the fundamental principles of classification, and I reiterate what I said earlier, it’s reducing complex information from projects or resources et cetera, into their simplest form for wider utility, be it decision making, policy formulation, or even project based decisions.

And this is one of the strengths of the UNFC, and again, originally it was designed as Hari mentioned earlier, from a peace point of view. So also unifying different frameworks, something that different countries industries and sectors can adopt regardless of let’s say their level of data maturity, et cetera.

So its structure is modular and flexible, which means that it can be scaled from occurrences, prospective projects, individual projects all the way to national and even regional inventories. And we see that in the scenario occurring in the European Union. So we, and again, we already see that in practice.

So as Erika mentioned governments do use it to structure the resource inventories. And geological surveys, for example, they use it to harmonize data sets and industry does apply it on a project level class classification, and then return reporting, et cetera. So when you bring all these layers together, the framework becomes, let’s say, a powerful tool for monitoring these resource supply.

And again, the strongest suit of UNFC is that it creates a common language for classifying resources, be it from countries or even cross resource comparison, et cetera. So allowing these decision makers to compare like with so as more stakeholders adopt UNFC, the scalability will definitely increase, not because UNFC will change, again, it is a modular and flexible tool, but because the ecosystem around it. Is maturing.

So the scalability becomes inherent, basically. And its full potential will be unlocked through. And this is where again, UNFC and its Expert Group on Resource Management are focusing on consistent implementation capacity, building integration with national databases digitalization, et cetera.

Chris Stockey Amazing. And I think, we’ve heard on this podcast from a few people, that the difference between UNFC and a CRIRSCO code and that ease of accessibility for policy makers and things like that. And I know that we’re gonna start talking, hopefully in the future in this episode about non-technical audiences and understanding a project, but another thing that came up in, I’m thinking particularly about Nicole Barlow’s episode was applicability to somewhere like Canada and some of the legal changes that we’ve seen out in British Columbia regarding rights and access and minerals projects.

Are there any, ’cause we’ve talked about kind of the materials and the systems and the circularity aspect that UNFC people are there any jurisdictions that either I, are worth highlighting for really being heavily involved in the UNFC conversation now?

Outside of that European lens? And I know we touched on a few there or any that you are hoping to engage with in the future? And I guess that’s everybody if there’s any thoughts to that.

Erika Ingvald But Africa is heavily involved. We see increased activity in South America, so we mentioned CRISCO a number of times now and it’s.

It’s used for primary raw materials and it’s used for stock market reporting. And I think that’s a strength. CRIRSCO is also a bridge to UNFC, so anyone who knows CRIRSCO could do a UNFC classification of a mining project or exploration project. But for Canada, I think UNFC could be very well used in parallel with three scope because Canada is also that’s one of the countries in the world I would guess, that are most caring about like indigenous people, about environment, about all those things that would go on our E Axis, as we call it the socio-economic and environmental axis.

But they could also apply to recycling projects or renewable energy projects or whatnot. So I think those parallel systems, they have different strengths and they have different uses and there is no reason for why Canada or Australia or I don’t know any country would not want to use it.

And it’s been used for a very long time in Ukraine, in India too, I think Ukraine has updated their national use to the latest specifications that came in, or the latest framework that was updated in 2019. And it’s just helpful. And it helps people talk to each other, whether it’s whether it’s a policymaker a civil servant or a geologist like most of us are here.

So I think there is nowhere where this is not useful.

Matthew Grimshaw I think this was really apparent, so we had a conversation with Ed Sides about that kind of application of CRIRSCO, and I think a lot of people are wanting, “do I use this or do you use that?” And like you say, they’re very different. It’s, you can’t put all into a thing.

And I really liked your comparison to where it’s a harmonization kind of piece. It’s that way where it’s a way to allow people to talk and pull thing different parts together. And especially in the world of the JORC and NI 43-101, there’s been a lot of discussion about how much environmental and social stuff should be in that type of reporting.

And I think a lot of people are like it’s for a slightly different purpose, so there’s other ways to do it. And like you said, you can’t ignore it and it’s just, it’s for a different purpose for the stock exchange. As I’m as we’re saying about trying to, how do we communicate that to different audiences?

Victoria, maybe if we could bring you in and ask you about that. How do you, ’cause you’ve obviously done a Master’s project on this and your, in your experience, how do you see that kind of UNFC being useful to communicate to people who aren’t geologists or technically adapt to this kind of stuff. Is it a useful way to communicate to different people for various different aspects?

Victoria Oliver Thank you for your question. I think it’s a very interesting and also important one. UNFC is a user-friendly tool and a simple use to, a simple tool to use. So I think this gives the opportunity to engage people not only from the technical side, but also from the non-technical audience.

So this makes, this gives access and let engage the non-technical audience as it makes it easier. So as Hari mentioned before, it can be seen as a communicative tool, but not only in the sense that it can communicate between governments, but also because it communicates about projects. When engaging, when a non-technical audience is engaging with, with the tool it’s communicating the tool, it gives you information about a project. It is allows you to understand how a project is working, how it’s going on, and also not to only to understand the project, but also to identify some gaps maybe in the system or in different a aspects of the project.

In UNFC terms, you have the different axis. So you have the E Axis that gives you information about the environmental, social, and economic aspects of the project. You have the F Axis that gives talks to you about the technical feasibility and the G axis about the degree of confidence.

So here you are getting the sense of the project. You’re getting information about the project. And I think the most interesting Axis for the non-technical audience is the E Axis, because it gives you, UNFC informs you about the environmental, social and governmental issues of a project.

So I think it’s interesting how they can engage within this area of focus, and I think this is one of the beauties of UNFC because it not only addresses to stakeholders such as industry, governments, or investors, but it also addresses civil society, which is which is also very important to, to have a dialogue with them and that they can understand how project works, but also they can get engaged and involved into such discussions.

Yeah, I think this is, this the tool UNFC gives an important opportunity to engage this type of stakeholders.

Matthew Grimshaw Yeah, no, I agree. And I think especially in many projects, particularly in mineral exploration, on mineral development, a lot of the things that are actually holding back projects are not the technical aspects of projects.

So a lot of the delays, overruns, or stalled projects, as you might wanna call them, isn’t to do with the technical aspects. So there’s a way to communicate that and maybe show where this might be how can you communicate that to government stakeholders. And everyone along that one, Ghadi, did you have anything to add on that?

Because I know that you are also involved in that side of things.

Ghadi Sabra Definitely. Yes, I do agree with Victoria. And just to echo what Victoria mentioned just now is that. Conventionally, the way them, and I go back to the mining sector, allow me to give this example just to make the point, allow a lot of the mining companies back then they thought about three main questions, right?

In developing their projects or going into production. And one of them was, is this project economically beneficial? However, with the E axis, now, it’s no longer the question only, and this is what UNFC portrays, right? It’s, is this project environmentally harmful, socially just, et cetera. So it integrates all these sustainability aspects into the E Axis of the UNFC.

So it always has been this space within the UNFC, of course, for socioeconomic and environmental considerations. And it captures these aspects. The however, in recent years and with the current developments, this landscape has changed. Of course. Now we have stricter ESG standards, measures policies on environmental aspects, et cetera.

So the expectations around sustainability, transparency and what if you want constitutes sustainable or responsible resource production, development and management on the long run are becoming more rigorous and detailed, right? So this evolution does create an important opportunity for UNFC to deepen and more systematically integrate the sustainability related data.

And this is going back to the point on scalability that I mentioned earlier and much of that is already happening. So the, in the E Axis, it aligns more closely with these emerging policy instruments. And we see that in the European scenery, such as in the EU Critical Raw Materials Act, and even in other international ESG standards or even due diligence requirements.

There is room to go. Further strengthening does mean applying it more consistency. Strengthening the E Axis, sorry, is does mean strengthening the consistency comparability, on these sustainability factors and how they are being reported, especially around climate impacts and social integration, and biodiversity engagement of course et cetera.

So embedding clear criteria can harmonize these indicators and the requirements basically would help UNFC practitioners to be more objective in their classification. And it would also help industry to better understand what is expected from the users of this classification, be it investors, or governments, et cetera.

So the key again, is balancing what the user is after and the UNFC would remain usable across these various contexts. So that’s just to add on what Victoria said.

Erika Ingvald Yeah, and I would like to add one more thing if you don’t mind, that if you start to have a portfolio of projects, let’s say, in a country then you can, so when you do this classification, it’s not one and done.

You will do it repeatedly to see the development of the project. But if you have this portfolio that you follow, then you start to see patterns. So if you have a really good legislation in your country, you will see that those projects that are really good projects, they should start somewhere down low in the cube and then they should travel up over time and become a viable project that is producing.

But if you start to see movements where these projects bump up and down the E Axis, for instance. If you see one project doing that, maybe that’s not a solid project, but if you see that pattern for many projects, then you might think that, “okay, maybe our permitting process or our legislation isn’t good enough. There is something here that could be improved.”

And so then you can use the portfolio of UNFC classification to actually evaluate your own jurisdiction and improve it so that the public, for instance, can feel safe that this, in this country, the legislation surrounding mining or recycling or whatever is something that we can trust.

So that’s that’s another thing. Once you start to have these portfolio projects, you can also see that, “ah, in this country things are going well. But in that country there are things to improve.” You can also follow a project if it doesn’t move forward or portfolio, project, they don’t move forward when it comes to tech technical feasibility, maybe you need to invest a bit more in innovation. So there are a lot of things you can do once you have this information and follow projects over time.

Chris Stockey I think that’s such a key point. And Erika, as I completely stole that point, although I did credit you with it when I recently spoke.

’cause it, it’s such an important point about the elevation of this to be about portfolio and systems recognition and true impact at a global scale which feels, for everybody’s having to fill in these, this documentation and regularly update. And if it’s through a strategic project application, you feel very project focused.

But it’s quite important that we remember that this is actually bigger and broader and better than that. And it’s actually about almost that. Global impact, global perceptions, global data trends, and a really powerful tool for that on that data trends element. Alex, I know that you’re chomping at the bit to jump in on a couple of data points, so I’ll pass over to you.

Alex Fuentes Thank you, Chris. And yeah, Erika, thank you for that point about the sort of really good point about leveraging UNFC as part of a portfolio of projects to really get the most out of it. I guess my question is that it is an undoubtedly fantastic, like utilization of it, but my concern is UNFC is very good at, let’s say, harmonizing different resources, different commodities across countries, et cetera.

But I guess what I wonder is if all these different countries or different projects that have different levels of accessibility to robust data, does that undermine the sort of potency of and the potential of UNFC from the start for UNFC practitioner? If that makes any sense.

Erika Ingvald Yeah. I love this question actually.

We always ask for more data and it’s what I think is that you’re absolutely right. It’s not only about jurisdictions not having access to data. It could be that the industry don’t have access to information they would need. So what I think is, and we have seen that again in the European Union, but I think it’s true in other parts of the world as well, that when you start, you are quite scattered.

You don’t have enough information about anything. You might not even know what kind of information you would like to have, but once this engine starts to move and you get this buildup, then you’ll see that, aha, this is very helpful for governments. I would guess that ministries or finance would love to have this buildup of portfolios, but also that, as I mentioned, you can start to evaluate your own jurisdiction.

But this would also help, it would make the public feel more safe if you can improve the legislations. But then it’s actually very important for the industry to have a transparent and predictable permitting process so that they can feel that things are moving in the right direction and they can show their government that, “Hey, in this country things are bumping up and down”, if I may use that terminology.

“And things aren’t working here, you need to improve.” So I think when a thing like this start. You don’t have enough data, but we don’t have anything better, right? So we need to get started and we need to move, and this is the exact same discussion as you would meet if you were to talk about transparency issues.

How do we get the, all the information with the battery that we want? How do we get everyone around the globe using the same standard for that? How do we get access to the data? What part of the data should be public? What should be available up on request? What, it’s the same questions, it doesn’t matter what thing you look at when you want this data.

But I think you need to get started because otherwise we won’t ever have this kind of information available to all the stakeholders that need that information.

Hari Tulsidas If I can jump into this question, because this is something which we are always worried about, but do we have the enough data or do we need more data about something?

Having any sort of data also introduces some element of errors in that. So any amount of data will have also a small error introduced into it. You have more data, you will have more errors also coming; so maintaining the quality of data, it’s very important. It is not just about having more and more data, which also introduce more and more errors.

We have to minimize errors as much as possible and have the right data which will support the right decisions. So some kind of streamlining is there. So this is principle, the fundamental principles with UNFC as used from the beginning, is to categorize data into boxes that are just about essential to make the right decisions.

And this is useful for companies also. We always think in terms of governments doing long-term planning, but companies also need this data so that they are sure that they are not going, running this project into an impossible direction and failing sometime.

Projects fails for different reasons, market volatilities, taxation issues, policy changes and the company should be on the top of all this at the same time. And sometimes more data will create more time to get into the right decision mode. So having the right data is very important, and this is what we always emphasize on.

Matthew Grimshaw Yeah. More data isn’t always better data, as and that’s coming from those in the UK where, a lot of our data for the UK is you have to pay for and also our mineral permitting process is very opaque and not a classic. Look at the exploration permits into it. Hari, the next question that we were keen to ask was around this other concept that’s within your remit, which is the UNRMS.

Could you maybe give us a bit of context about that and how that relates to the UNFC and how they how you see it working more closely in the future?

Hari Tulsidas Yeah. We, UNFC had been built over years to a certain extent, and then around 2021 we had COVID hitting us. That opened a new level of thinking.

How can the projects be resilient also to various disruptions? COVID was one black swan that hit us, but there could be many things that can come up in the future. We have extreme weather events driven by climate change. We have water stress, we have social unrest, general social unrest in the society, across countries.

So we thought that resource management is has to come up with much more integrated way of governing itself. And there should be a set of principles that drive it. You not have defined laws in which copper mining should be done, or nickel mining should be done that then. That, that makes it impossible to have a global framework because each country or each project will have different unique aspects.

For example, if you take the mining industry the biggest issue of mining industry perhaps is the lack of good grade. Today we have mined all the good grades, so we have to go deeper into the earth. The downside is you are creating more material. You are mining more material, which will not be used.

You are from 10% copper grade, you are now mining at 0.0% grade of copper means 99.6% of what you are mining is now is a waste, technically a waste. And this is creating a limitation for all mining industries across the world. Where, what are you going to do with the tailings and the mine waste, which is piling up?

For example, you take: phosphate fertilizes, very essential for food production. It is very essential for our quality, maintaining our quality of living, nutrition and all. But for every tonne of phosphate fertilizer, we produce six tonnes of phosphogypsum waste. And the amount of waste that is being stored today has grown to so much an immense extent that there are mountains of phosphogypsum around the world. And that is the limit to phosphate mining today. Similarly, water stress. About 25% of the mining today are stressed of water. Some of the mining projects in Australia, for example, if you want to start it, you should have a desalination plant, and that means you need energy to run a desalination process.

So this is all interlinked. So we think that we have to do away from the linear thinking of resource management and go to something different. Circularity. That means also value addition, innovation, looking at comprehensive resource recovery, how you can extract resources with minimal disturbance to the ground and and the environment, including that the climate, in atmosphere into which we are dumping a lot of CO2 waste. UNFC gives a snapshot of where resources are, what their different social, environmental, technical aspects are. UNRMS is gives a path forward which which will allow you to develop this resources as benefits to the people.

These are all public good. The society, civilization should benefit from all these activities. Profits are important. Companies do it because they get profit and without profit nothing can be done. But this projects also should be beneficial to the companies as well as the people who are getting them, are going to use them.

So we, whether we are using the mobile phone or communication tools like we are communicating or the internet some data center is supporting this communication. It is using a lot of energy. It is using a lot of water to do that. And we have to be mindful of what all impacts it is making and how we can decouple this, that is what we are always thinking, how we can decouple progress from use of materials like what we were doing in the past.

So this decoupling is what UNRMS is trying to do. It tries to provide a pathway forward into a new mineral governance paradigm that will be looking at ultimate benefits to the people. We want to fight climate change, but it should not introduce new challenges 20 or 30 years down the line, which then we will all scramble to fix.

So UNRMS is brought in with that vision of providing the basic principles that will not lead us into new unknown situations, new uncertainties.

Chris Stockey Thank you so much. I think, yeah, everybody will be looking forward to keep an eye out for all of those resources as well. I think you know it in a moment what we’re gonna would like to do is go around the room and just wrap up with that. What, to you in one sentence, maybe two, is the true power of UNFC? And Ghadi, I’m putting you on notice that we’re coming to you first, so consider yourself warned. But I think that, it’s been amazing having this opportunity to speak with all of you about, to me that power is the dynamism of UNFC.

While the best explanations I ever heard of it was somebody who used to work at the UNECE Slavko Solar, describe it to me as a scenario analysis tool. And that it is that dynamic living, breathing, decision making, supporting tools and give you the answers. But the power is in the more people that apply it, the better perspective we have at a global systems level.

And therefore the more informed every stakeholder at every local to global, regional scale can be. So that’s my take. Ghadi over to yourself and the we’ll come to Victoria.

Ghadi Sabra Yes. Just in simple terms here, Chris. The major benefit, if we want to think as of sustainable development as a global common goal, we need the common language for that.

And this is the UNFC’s strongest suit allows all stakeholders across different regions, across different countries across different resources to communicate the same language. And to connect it with the UNRMS here, UNFC does put forth all the projects information and UNRMS works towards let’s say producing this project in a more sustainable way going from point 1 all the way to point the endpoint basically and allowing us to get, again, this bird eye view what is basically being produced, for example, in the mining world, the, not what the commodity itself is priced in the market, but what are the environmental implications, the water used, et cetera.

So getting this overview of what is being produced and how to avoid future issues and not to repeat what history has done already. So Brilliant.

Chris Stockey A summary. Thanks, Ghadi over to yourself, Victoria, and then we’ll come to you. Hari.

Victoria Oliver I think Ghadi highlighted the most important aspect of the tool, but yeah to add on that maybe, yeah this thing that it integrates the environmental and social issues.

I think it’s very important to have those ones in projects and classification.

Chris Stockey Awesome. Thanks Victoria. And I think we’ve been really delighted to see in this series, just always every episode that E Axis is coming up as such an important point, which is great, hammering that point home throughout the industry.

Hari, over to yourself and then Erika, bring us home.

Hari Tulsidas Yeah. In a sentence what I think about UNFC and UNRMS is we need to know where resources exist, how it exist, and how much is there for us to take it. We also want to know how beneficial it is to use it to develop and use it, whether we should be using in it in a particular approach or in a different approach.

So whether resource exist and how beneficial it’ll be to use it. These are the two questions that we try to answer.

Chris Stockey Fantastic. Thanks so much, Hari. Important questions to answer. Erika in a couple of sentences. What’s the true power of UNFC?

Erika Ingvald Yeah, so standing on the shoulders of my colleagues in this podcast, but also on all the experts in our Expert Group, and thinking back on something, one of you said, we had see these numbers with 1 of 1000 or 1 of 10,000 projects succeeding.

I think that. UNFC is a tool that can make this whole industry smarter. So we will come down to maybe one of 200. It’s, we all know it’s really difficult to develop these projects just technically geologically, but if this tool can help all the stakeholders to do to be smarter, I think that would be a really good outcome of this work.

Chris Stockey Amazing. Thank you Erika. All about that. Stakeholder literacy and resting more are the biggest problems in our sector in that one in a thousand. I think there’s nothing more for us to say other than to say an enormous thank you to each and every one of you for joining us today and taking the time.

It’s been a real pleasure getting to speak to you with all of the different nuances and perspectives that you can bring to this conversation as the authorities that UNECE are. So a massive thank you from us!

Erika Ingvald And a massive thank you from us!

Hari Tulsidas Thank you everyone.

Ghadi Sabra Thank you. Thank you guys.

Victoria Oliver Thank you very much.

Alex Fuentes Thanks for joining us in discussion with the UNECE and throughout the series so far. For me today, it was a highlight to hear the perspectives of those at the heart of the development of the United Nations Framework Classification for Resources. So please join us next time in the final episode of the UNFC podcast, where we’ll be doing a recap of the whole series and discussing what we learned and what stood out to us in the always developing world of UNFC.

Matthew Grimshaw The views, thoughts and opinions expressed by guests or contributors on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the hosts, Satarla, and Critical Productions, any statements made should not be interpreted as endorsements or official positions. Listener discretion is advised.