Data assessment for northern mining transportation decision-support models

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Northern Canada holds vast natural resources, and developing these resources is projected to be a major driverof economic growth over the next several decades. At the same time, the north's communities and highlyfragile ecosystems are experiencing disproportionate impacts of a rapidly changing climate. These factorsintroduce unique and significant uncertainties into decision-making on enormously costly transportationinvestments, including those that support mining activities. Stakeholders akin to Agnico Eagle Mines Limitedneed high-quality analysis tools to inform their decision-making processes on their transportationinfrastructures in these sensitive northern environments. Current analysis tools to support transportationinvestment planning are unsuited to the northern context's remarkably complex challenges. In this project, weaim to work directly with Agnico Eagle to perform an assessment of their data, in order to gauge thesufficiency of their data to support transportation infrastructure decision models. We will also develop thepreliminary framework of these models - using options analysis - to quantitatively formalize the stochasticinputs of climate conditions, environmental impacts, and natural resource prices on Agnico Eagle'stransportation infrastructure decisions. These decisions could include under what conditions (of climateconditions, environmental mitigation, resource prices, etc.) one set of transportation facilities may be morecost-effective than another. The model supports flexible decisions as these sources of uncertainty and riskchange over time. The expected outcome of this project is an extensive data assessment and framework to buildan analysis tool specifically designed for Agnico Eagle's transportation needs within the northern Canadiancontext, specifically focusing our attention to their Meadowbank operations. The project will quantify howAgnico Eagle can balance efficient operations with environmental and social responsibilities. The project willcontribute a new application for northern mining transportation infrastructure analysis, and train 2 HQP in aninterdisciplinary area of key importance to Canada's north.