Integrating Indigenous Perspectives and Traditional Knowledge into Closure Planning: Opportunities for Practical Application Workshop

Workshop overview

This workshop will focus on circumpolar examples of climate change and Indigenous participation, but will be globally relevant for mines through good understanding of one context/example. The focus will be on the integration of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives using caribou (reindeer)-specific case studies, including their habitat and migratory patterns, as well as the implications around social closure and opportunities for culturally relevant monitoring programs to support closure and post-closure implementation.

Climate change effects are more severe in polar regions, with significant changes in mean temperature, summer temperatures, and growing degree days leading to accelerating loss of permafrost, changes in vegetation and wildlife communities and changing land use patterns for Indigenous peoples throughout the circumpolar. Planning for climate change in engineering, mining, and closure projects is key for future planning of mining in the Arctic.

Incorporating Indigenous perspectives into industrial projects is a rapidly advancing area of inquiry – ERM and Agnico Eagle will set the stage of the current best practices in engaging, collecting and incorporating Indigenous Knowledge and perspectives into capital projects, including mining and mine closure within the context of climate change and a changing environment.

This workshop will leverage ERM’s and Agnico Eagle’s decades of experience working with Indigenous groups and our partners across the Canadian Arctic and western Canada. This includes including Indigenous perspectives and Traditional Knowledge in environmental studies, project design, environmental assessments, monitoring programs and mine closure. We will walk through some of the common pitfalls in consultation and gathering Indigenous perspectives, considering Indigenous Knowledge and TK on an equal footing with western science and incorporating these two ways of knowing into mine planning and engineering. We will also discuss our experience in effective communications with Indigenous Communities, as well as lessons learned from successes and challenges in communications.

ERM and Agnico Eagle will provide concrete examples of successes and areas for improvement in communicating and working with Indigenous groups. ERM and Agnico Eagle will also discuss how proper incorporation of climate change and Indigenous perspectives can feed into environment and social governance (ESG) and Nature Positive objectives and reporting.