Brazil 2025 a focus for Mining 2030’s earth-moving agenda
- 11 November 2024
Adam Matthews sees the PRI (Principles for Responsible Investment) in Person annual conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in November next year as perhaps the most appropriate stage on which to lay down the detailed steps to be taken by the world’s major investors to “reshape the playing field towards responsible mining”.
The face and voice of the US$15 trillion-backed Global Investor Commission on Mining 2030 wants to frame final recommendations from the commission’s recently released Landscape Report for some of the world’s biggest investors in mining, infrastructure and manufacturing by the middle of 2025.
And then circulate the vital investor agenda outlining measures that could – should – fundamentally change engagement between financial institutions and the world’s mining and metals industries into the future.
The November 2025 PRI in Person event in Sao Paulo will mark the influential organisation’s return to Latin America after an absence of more than a decade.
Matthews, chair of the Mining 2030 commission and chief responsible investment officer at the £3.4 billion Church of England Pensions Board, says the catastrophic Brumadinho mine tailings dam failure in 2019, which followed the earlier Mariana dam collapse in Brazil, catalysed events that led to the commission’s creation and delivery of the “Landscape Report: The Role of Investors in Realising an Environmentally and Socially Responsible Mining Industry”.
“So it feels that that's the place where we want to be able to turn up with a real agenda for supporting this responsible mining industry and pulling all the levers that we’ve got available to us,” Matthews says.
The agenda – coupled with progress with vital government and industry levers – is expected to rapidly reverberate through the global mining and metals development, financing, regulatory and reporting landscape.
Global Investor Commission on Mining 2030 members include 85 significant financial institutions with more than $15 trillion under management.
Matthews is confident that group will “grow quite dramatically in the course of the next year”.
“As a result of the first-phase report we know that there's a lot more funds that are now looking to join as investor supporters,” he says.
“I’m also very conscious that the report's having far greater reach beyond that core group.
“We’ve had a lot of interest post the report launch which we did at PRI in Person in Toronto.
“The landscape study needed to serve a few [objectives] which set up what is this second phase.
“If we’re going to engage the wider investor community beyond just those that actively invest in mining today, and if we're going to challenge any of the fundamentals of the way that we understand the sector, invest in the sector, steward the sector, then we needed to do what we've done in the landscape report, which is present a core picture of the industry … and then look at the issues that are going to challenge the sector to grow and that we're going to need to address if it's going to be able to meet [projected] critical mineral demand whilst also acknowledging that element that’s going to need to decline.
“And then, what are our levers as investors: where are our touch points with the industry in that future picture?
“On that basis we set six strategic objectives that now flow through to the second phase.
“That [starts with] developing a set of very practical ideas, proposals and recommendations for investors and the wider finance sector.
“And the aim is that in each of those strands we are engaging in broad dialogues with industry, civil society, governments, etc, which has started, with the view that that then gets drawn together into the final report of the commission.
“The detailed action plans for investors then will range from individual actions that can be taken at fund level, through to what we can do collaboratively; through to the policy interface and, equally, where we need to play a very proactive role in the way that we have in, say, tailings, where investors have really lent in with industry and other entities to drive solutions.
“Where is it that we need to do that on other issues?
“Where is it that we can consolidate?
“And I think that will produce a package of steps that can be taken which, if we see adoption and roll-out within wider industry, enables us to also behave differently as well.
“I think that’s where you’re looking at not only our expectation of industry, our expectation of the value chain, but our expectation and our own discipline of how we as a finance sector need to be operating.
“There are some really interesting, practical discussions for us to be having as an investor community. Equally, are asset owners creating the mandates for our fund managers who are often the day-to-day interlocutors?
“When you hear from mining companies that they’re under pressure for dividends and quarterly returns … often that’s coming from the fund manager sector. There are very few asset owners directly dealing with the mining industry – and they are the ones who have the assets. So there’s an open question that we're going to be looking at with asset owners in the commission, [and that is] are we creating the right mandates for our managers who are the main interlocutors with this industry?
“Are we incentivising and rewarding the best practice? And are we putting short-term pressures into a sector that we really need to be looking at through a longer lens in terms of time horizons?
“I give you the example of our fund ... We are a multi-decadal pension fund. Our time horizons are multi-decadal. The mining industry is multi-decadal. The current time from exploration to extraction needs to come down significantly, which we recognise is a problem, but fundamentally it’s a multi-decadal industry, and yet the intermediaries are operating often on much shorter time horizons.
“I think it’s been a dereliction of responsibility from asset owners in actually understanding the sector and creating the right incentives for our managers to be approaching it potentially through a different lens.
“Again, that’s the kind of question that we’re going to be actively looking at in the commission in these in these six strands.”
Matthews doesn’t shy away from the shadow – or more aptly, the light – the commission and its influencers can cast over the world’s minerals and metals producers and suppliers at a time when their major representative bodies are working assiduously to redirect industry practices.
He believes the heavyweight, multi-stakeholder approach of the commission and its constituents can “really shape the whole sector going forward”.
“Through the wider investment community we are extremely significant players in all the major sectors that are demanding the outputs from mining,” he says.
“We are clearly significant investors in [mining and metals companies] as well.
“My sense is that there’s an opportunity to reshape the playing field towards responsible mining, making it the norm. And it becomes increasingly difficult for those operators that are not seeking to walk down that path.
“Whilst I recognise there’s always going to be a space for some actors to produce in a way that isn’t seeking to do it in the most responsible way ... How can we shift the market towards those that are doing it in the right way? That is something that we feel that we can significantly influence.
“We’re not naive that this doesn't also involve policy.
“Learning the lessons from the whole climate approach, which we have been very prominent in in the sense that there is a clear set of policy actions that need to move in tandem with this, it can’t just be down to the market or investors. It has to move with policy being aligned, [with] regulators starting to utilise good regulation, enforcement and incentivisation.
“And also governments that are particularly in demand – strong countries – using their procurement policies.
“I visited DRC [and] met with the president of DRC. I look at his objectives as a president to be able to support infrastructure and agriculture [and] very much wanting to use what's under the ground to be able to enable his vision on top of the ground.
“How are we practically enabling a mineral rich country like that to realise those opportunities?
“It’s, of course, challenging.
“If you want the best practitioners to be doing that it’s going to require investors to give boards of companies the confidence to … be thinking about moving into a space like that, with the support of G7 governments, alongside investors, and looking at the kind of funding mechanisms that we can create to enable that to be realised.
“I think if we can work in those kinds of partnerships much more proactively – some of it’s going to be bottom up, country up, etc – again, that’s going to go part of the way to enabling us to realise the potential to shape this in a different direction.
“And again we’ve got a role to play in the infrastructure funds.
“Pension funds are particularly interested in infrastructure and alongside any mining company that’s going to be going into a place like DRC there’s a lot of infrastructure that’s going to be needed to be created in energy, transport, etc.
“That’s where I think you’ve got a particular need for investors to lean in on this.
“So we are looking at all of those areas.
“This is about having a good, clear-eyed sense of where we can use our levers but at the same time where we need to be absolutely clear: these are the ones public policy makers need to pull, and this is where we need to see the leadership as well.”
