Opinion: Beyond the Plateau: Rethinking the Role of Safety in Mining Risk

By Jacques Botha, Principal Consultant, dss+

As the mining industry gathers in Cape Town for Mining Indaba 2026, it does so with evidence of real progress on safety. In South Africa, the formal mining sector recorded 42 fatalities in 2024, the lowest number ever reported. Early indications suggest that 2025 may again deliver historically low fatality levels.

Progress matters. It reflects years of sustained effort, investment and leadership attention across the industry. It also provides an important moment to pause and reflect on what safety now represents in a mining context that is becoming more complex, more constrained and more volatile.

While headline indicators have improved, serious safety events continue to occur in well-run operations. This is not due to a lack of effort and investment. It is a reflection of how safety is currently positioned within the broader operational agenda.

When safety is strong, but risk remains

Safety in mining is rightly considered as a non-negotiable. Few industries have invested as heavily in standards, governance and training. In most companies, safety sits prominently on executive and board agendas and is embedded within the enterprise risk frameworks.

At the same time, the persistence of high-consequence events highlights a structural tension. Recordable injury rates and fatality trends provide some important insights into overall safety performance, but they do not fully describe how exposure to serious harm is created and managed in complex operating systems.

Serious incidents rarely arise from isolated acts or single failures. They emerge from combinations of conditions and behaviours: how work is planned, how assets are maintained, how people and contractors are deployed, and how decisions are made when conditions change. In that sense, safety outcomes are inseparable from how operational risk is shaped.

Safety as a boundary, and as a design input

In many organisations, safety functions effectively as a boundary condition. It defines what must not be compromised. That is a strength, not a weakness.

The challenge is that boundary conditions still need to be designed into the system. They need to inform how plans are constructed, how trade-offs are managed and how operational margins are protected before work begins.

This is where safety and operational risk often drift apart in practice. Safety is heavily governed, escalated and reviewed. Operational risk is worked through schedules, production plans,

maintenance strategies and capital decisions. The connection between the two is not always explicit at the point where exposure is actually shaped.

As operating environments become more variable, this matters more. Ageing and customised assets, tighter production constraints, increased contractor reliance and climate-related disruption all amplify the consequences of weak interfaces and poorly governed trade-offs. When control erodes, it tends to do so across systems, not within a single function.

Shifting the safety conversation

What distinguishes organisations that continue to improve is not stronger intent or broader programmes. It is a shift in how safety is used in operational thinking.

The most effective approaches take a systemic view, recognising that safety is an expression of how stable and controllable the operation really is. They focus attention on the points where exposure is created: handovers between planning and execution, interactions between maintenance and operations, and the decisions that address risk weeks or months before outcomes are visible.

They also concentrate effort. In practice, a small number of controls and decisions have a disproportionate influence on whether operations remain resilient under pressure. Making those points visible to leaders, and ensuring they are governed with the same discipline and commitment as cost or schedule, delivers far more impact than spreading attention thinly across many initiatives.

From safety outcomes to risk exposure

This reframing connects safety directly to operational risk.

Climate volatility, infrastructure constraints and supply-chain fragility mean that the same conditions that elevate serious safety risk, also threaten production continuity and asset integrity. As a result, many mining companies are beginning to think more explicitly about exposure: where it sits, how it changes, and how it can be reduced through design rather than reaction.

Seen through this lens, safety is not a parallel objective to be managed alongside performance. It is one of the clearest expressions of whether operational risk is genuinely under control.

The agenda shift ahead

Reaching record-low fatality levels is a significant achievement. It does not mark the end of the safety journey. It marks a transition.

In the next phase, progress will come less from doing more of the same, and more from how effectively safety informs the design and management of operational risk in a more volatile world.

For an industry built on trust, reliability and long-term value creation, that shift is not about lowering standards. It is about using safety, deliberately and intelligently, to strengthen how mining operations absorb pressure, manage uncertainty and perform when it matters most.