Acre Insights

Natural ResourcesThought Leadership

Our Most Valuable Resource Isn't in the Ground

At 3:30pm on November 5, 2015, a tailings dam near Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil began to leak. The Fundão Dam, operated by Samarco and built to store waste from the Germano iron ore mine, sat in the hills above the village of Bento Rodrigues. By 4:20pm, the leak had become a catastrophic rupture.

 

>> Read the full piece here

An estimated 43.7 million cubic metres of mine tailings surged into the Doce River. The toxic sludge engulfed Bento Rodrigues and Paracatu de Baixo, killing 19 people, displacing thousands, and contaminating hundreds of kilometres of waterways before reaching the Atlantic Ocean. It remains Brazil’s worst environmental disaster. The social, environmental, and economic impacts are still being felt and will likely persist for generations.

Four years later, the Brumadinho tailings dam disaster, also in Brazil, caused by the sudden collapse of an iron ore waste dam, killed 270 people.  At precisely the moment when minerals were becoming central to the global energy transition, mining found itself in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

The industry response was significant.

In 2020, the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management (GISTM) was launched by the International Council on Mining and Metals, the United Nations Environment Programme, and the Principles for Responsible Investment. It introduced a globally recognised framework built on zero harm, board-level accountability, independent oversight, transparent disclosure, and planning for worst-case failure scenarios.

Alongside this, the Mining Association of Canada’s Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) standard has also become a widely adopted industry framework over the last 20 years, focusing on continuous performance improvement across environmental and social responsibility, including tailings management, community engagement, and site-level accountability.

Across the sector, leadership teams have started to rethink and reshape their relationship with the land, communities, investors, and employees.

But standards and frameworks alone do not create responsible mining. People do.

>> Read the full piece here

News

Acre is strengthening its B Corp community with a special offer for B Corp Month

For almost 25 years, Acre has operated at the intersection of impact and commercial performance. We have never seen these as competing priorities, but as forces that drive the other forward.

We became a B Corp in 2022. While we were already deeply committed to social and environmental impact, certification brought measurement, accountability and a public commitment that gives our ambition substance.

The idea that social and environmental impact should sit alongside financial performance should not be radical. Yet for some, it still is. The B Corp movement has done more than any other initiative to bring this conversation into the mainstream, and I have enormous respect for the organisations that have chosen to meet that standard.

As we mark B Corp Month, we are offering our executive search, recruitment and advisory services to certified B Corps at a preferential rate throughout March.

Whether you are scaling, strengthening governance, building sustainability capability or hiring transformational leadership, we would be delighted to support you through our global network of offices in Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Our support extends beyond recruitment to include marketplace salary insights that enable sustainable growth, leadership assessments grounded in sustainability frameworks, and advisory guidance to ensure your organisation manages its risks and evolves in step with its ambition.

Please email me directly at ac@acre.com to explore how we can support your journey. Either I can help you personally, or I will connect you with someone in our global network who can.

Thank you to B Lab, and to every organisation choosing to lead in this way. We are proud to be part of this community.