Researchers from the Institute for Ecological Economics have recently released a novel database on global coal and metal production on the level of individual mines. The accompanying Data Descriptor paper has now been published in Nature Scientific Data.

The database covers production data for 1171 individual mines, 80 different materials, between the years 2000 and 2021. Further, it includes data on mining coordinates, ownership, mineral reserves, mining waste and more. More than 1900 openly available sources, primarily annual reports of mining companies, were used to compile the database.

The new database contributes to making the extraction of coal and metals more transparent regarding their origin. Further, it provides a data foundation for linking environmental impacts to the mined commodities (e.g. coal, copper) entering global supply chains.

The database is the result of more than three years of research in the FINEPRINT project by Simon Jasansky, Mirko Lieber, Stefan Giljum and Victor Maus from the WU Institute for Ecological Economics.

Find out more in the paper, published open acccess in Nature Scientific Data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-023-01965-y