Early-stage water management embedded in mine design, rather than retrofitted later, is being pushed by Marnus Koorts, Director of Capital and Process at Weir, as a core variable alongside throughput and grind size. Koorts argues that integrating water balances, tailings deposition plans and pump/sump layouts from concept study stage cuts risk of flooding, unplanned dewatering and costly rework. For engineers, this means specifying pipelines, thickeners and water-recovery circuits in initial flowsheets, not as bolt-ons once pit expansion or TSF instability exposes gaps.

ICMM has appointed Froydis Cameron-Johansson as its next President and CEO, effective 23 November 2026, succeeding Rohitesh Dhawan after more than five years in the role. Cameron-Johansson brings senior global leadership experience from major mining houses, positioning her to influence ICMM’s work on tailings governance, Scope 3 emissions and responsible sourcing standards across its 26 member companies. Leadership continuity at ICMM matters for operators because its frameworks often feed directly into site-level ESG criteria, investor due diligence, and permitting expectations.

Record metals and mining returns entering 2026 are being driven largely by gold, with sector-wide market capitalisation at an all-time high and balance sheets among the strongest in a decade, McKinsey’s Global Materials Perspective 2026 reports. Behind the headline numbers, overall industry productivity has stalled and value creation is increasingly concentrated in a small group of top-quartile performers. For operators, this points to growing pressure to extract more value from existing assets through operational excellence, brownfield debottlenecking and disciplined capital allocation rather than volume-led growth.