Proposal of an indicator-based sustainability assessment framework for the mining sector of APEC economies

The mining sector faces some of the most difficult sustainability challenges of any industrial sector. The mining sector is remarkably significant to the development of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) region, because the majority of global trade and investment in this region depends on this sector. Therefore, the assessment of mining sector sustainability at national and global scales in APEC economies is an important task. So far, however, mining sector sustainability assessment frameworks have only been developed at small scales, such as companies and cities. In this study, therefore, it is proposed an indicator-based sustainability assessment framework (iSAF) to assess mining sector sustainability at national and global scales. In this framework, fuzzy logic was utilized to adequately deal with the uncertainty and vagueness of human expressions. The conventional fuzzy scales were suitably modified in the proposed framework to facilitate confident decision-making by the relevant stakeholders. In order to avoid repeatedly conducting the judgment until the acceptable consistency was obtained, iSAF implemented an innovative theory to deal with unacceptable consistencies in judgment. The proposed iSAF was applied to the mining sector of APEC economies using data from the APEC 2010 Project. As for the results, three important criteria including economic, environmental, and social criteria and twenty significant indicators were appropriately selected to cover the actual situation in the sector. The results showed that iSAF was a suitable framework for preventing uncertainty and vagueness in decision-making. iSAF was found to provide crucial support to decision-makers, not only in identifying and structuring the main components contributing to sustainability, but also in pointing out the factors in which significant investment should be made to effectively improve sustainability.