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Total prospectivity, Multi-criteria assessment to balance geological, economic and environmental factors in mineral exploration

Created 17/10/2025

Updated 17/10/2025

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Mineral exploration and development involves the selection of potential projects which must be evaluated across disparate characteristics. However, the distinct metrics involved are typically difficult to reconcile (e.g. geological potential, environmental impact, jobs created, value generated, etc.). Separate stakeholders—with different goals and attitudes—will reasonably differ in their preferences as to which categories to prioritize and how much weight to give to each. These conflicting preferences can obscure optimal outcomes and confound project selection.

In this presentation, we will discuss how early-stage exploration decisions can be treated as multi-criteria optimization problems. We show how this approach can be used to effectively evaluate and communicate competing criteria, and locate regions that perform best under a range of different metrics. We then outline a mapping framework that identifies regions that perform best in terms of geological potential, economic value and environmental impact and demonstrate this approach in a real-word example that highlights new exploration targets in the Australian context.

Abstract presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting 2023 (AGU23) https://www.agu.org/fall-meeting

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Field Value
Title Total prospectivity, Multi-criteria assessment to balance geological, economic and environmental factors in mineral exploration
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/en/dataset/e40b6d42-7b6f-4790-a935-47315bfc1241
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 19/02/2024
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
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Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "Total prospectivity, Multi-criteria assessment to balance geological, economic and environmental factors in mineral exploration". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/total-prospectivity-multi-criteria-assessment-to-balance-geological-economic-and-environmental-