Guide for Prioritizing and Evaluating Environmental Remediation Projects: Managing Mining Legacies

The guide offers methodologies and guidelines for developing public policies to prioritize environmental remediation investments in Latin America and the Caribbean. It emphasizes risk control for people and the environment, and integrates economic, financial, and human rights analyses to support informed decision-making. This guide aims to provide information, methodologies and guidelines to those in charge of generating or applying public policies aimed at prioritising investments focused on environmental remediation projects. It explores the concepts of mining environmental liabilities and remediation, as well as their main features, considering the heterogeneity of definitions in the different countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. Emphasis is placed on the protection of human rights, environmental protection, liability for remediation of damage, and economic and financial analysis. In particular, common definitions and guiding frameworks are provided to homogenise economic and financial analysis around risk-based environmental management. The starting point is that any remediation project must first control the risk to people and the environment. Then, financial, economic and social analyses allow for the identification of the most suitable projects according to the prevailing conditions. The concepts presented throughout this paper are applied and understood in the fields of public sector economics, environmental economics, welfare economics and financial economics.