A total of 42 people employed by mining and metals advocacy group ICMM company members lost their lives at work in 2024. This compares with 36 in 2023 and 33 in 2022. 

“No one should have to risk their life to do their job. This remains our irrevocable starting point, our standard and our shared responsibility. But tragically, for the second consecutive year, fatalities among ICMM member companies have risen, instead of continuing their previous long-term decline,” ICMM president and CEO Rohitesh Dhawan said.

The ‘Safety Performance: Benchmarking Progress of ICMM company members in 2024' report, published on July 10, benchmarks the 2024 safety performance of ICMM’s 24 member companies, which represent about one-third of the global mining and metals industry. 

The report analyses fatalities from ICMM company members based on the cause and provides safety performance metrics by country and company.

In 2024, nine of the 42 fatalities were related to mobile equipment and transportation, and five fatalities were caused by fall-of-ground-related incidents.

Company member operations in South Africa had the highest number of fatalities, at 15, accounting for 35% of the total fatalities. Meanwhile, nine out of 24 members reported zero fatalities for the year. 

“Together, we must turn this moment of reckoning into a movement of change. The industry can and must do better. To that end, we are revising our guidance on critical control management to better address current risks and realities.

“We are continuing to work on accelerating the adoption of safer vehicle technology to eliminate fatalities from vehicle interactions through our Innovation for Cleaner, Safer Vehicles initiative.

“We are strengthening our focus on psychological health and safety, alongside and intertwined with our work on physical safety. Finally, we are strengthening our commitment to peer learning and transparency by developing new mechanisms to better share learnings after fatal incidents within the ICMM membership,” Dhawan said.

ICMM began collating and publishing data on members’ safety performance in 2012 with the intention of driving transparency, learning and continual improvement across the industry. This data is compiled using ICMM’s ‘Guidance on Health and Safety Performance Indicators’.