The main driver of climate change is the many human activities that directly affect our environment. This produces, for example: an increase in greenhouse gases emissions, ecosystems destruction or unsustainable resources consumption. Within this context, the mining industry is partially responsible for the impact and contribution to global warming acceleration.

Usually, mining companies avoid considering environmental costs within their mine planning optimization processes, because there is a belief it will affect the business value, instead of realizing that this is an opportunity to increase the efficiency of mineral reserve exploitation through the definition and quantification of mine-planning scenarios that include all the different ecological costs.

The approach of the solution is the incorporation of ecological costs (carbon emissions, area of damaged pits, waste dumps and tailings dam, value depreciation of direct and indirect ecological services) in order to optimize the plan with a new "Green NPV" that considers all these costs.

These ecological costs should not be ignored anymore, as they are present in every mining operation either as explicit or opportunity costs. Therefore, they must be considered in the decision-making analysis and included in a logical way in the strategic mine planning process.

This analysis may allow, among other things, generate energy-efficient projects that minimize their environmental impact, which would lead to a reduction in "green" taxes and an advantage when obtaining environmental permits and licenses for a mining project.

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