Post-mining land use and associated economies have become a priority issue in mine lifecycle planning amongst many major companies. Ensuring the post-mining landscape is returned to a safe and stable condition is usually the first order priority in mine closure, though achieving this is often a challenge. The drive for industry to do more than rehabilitation is also growing. One of the many drivers for this expectation is the scale of mines, with many mining leases occupying thousands of hectares. Some of this land may be used for other purposes with relatively little intervention. For the mine footprint itself, it is often not possible or feasible to return the landscape to the prior condition, although creative repurposing of mine features and elements of mine infrastructure may be an option. At the same time, these large-scale mines employ hundreds, sometimes thousands of people and consideration of economic transitions for mining workforces, notably local dependant populations, is increasingly expected of industry post closure, as employment is often positioned at the “heart” of development. In this article, we reframe mining as a temporary land use. This approach positions post-mining land use as intrinsic to the mine lifecycle, including the planning and operational phases. We developed a global database of repurposing cases building on the S&P Global Market Intelligence database, relevant literature and other publicly available information. We provide an overview of the findings and the themes to emerge from this global repurposing database of 141 cases. Our findings include: our general observations on the research process; an analysis of the most common repurposing land uses; factors influencing repurposing, including factors internal and external to the company; initial observations about industry approaches to repurposing. Finally, we argue that reconceptualising mine ‘closure’ and the associated mining legacies is an essential operational shift the extractives industry, notably the major companies, will need to make to keep pace with societal and local community expectation.

采矿后土地利用和相关经济已成为许多主要公司在矿山生命周期规划中的优先问题。确保采矿后的环境恢复到安全和稳定的状态通常是矿山关闭的首要任务，尽管实现这一目标通常是一个挑战。推动工业做的不仅仅是康复的动力也在增长。这种预期的众多驱动因素之一是矿山的规模，许多采矿租约占地数千公顷。其中一些土地可以用于其他目的，干预相对较少。对于矿山足迹本身，将景观恢复到先前状态通常是不可能或不可行的，尽管创造性地重新利用矿山特征和矿山基础设施元素可能是一种选择。同时，这些大型矿山雇佣了数百人，有时是数千人，而且人们越来越期望在关闭后的行业中考虑采矿劳动力的经济转型，尤其是当地依赖人口，因为就业往往是发展的“核心”。在本文中，我们将采矿重新定义为临时土地使用。这种方法将采矿后的土地利用定位为矿山生命周期的内在因素，包括规划和运营阶段。我们在标准普尔全球市场情报数据库、相关文献和其他公开信息的基础上开发了一个重新利用案例的全球数据库。我们概述了这个包含 141 个案例的全球再利用数据库中的发现和主题。我们的发现包括： 我们对研究过程的一般观察；最常见的土地再利用分析；影响再利用的因素，包括公司内部和外部因素；关于行业再利用方法的初步观察。最后，我们认为重新定义矿山“关闭”和相关的采矿遗产是采掘业，尤其是大型公司，需要做出的重要运营转变，以跟上社会和当地社区的期望。