GAIA Hosts International Stakeholder Workshop on Sustainable Tailings Monitoring in Seville

On 10 September 2025, the GAIA-TSF project successfully convened its Stakeholder Workshop in Seville, hosted by the Iberian Sustainable Mining Cluster (ISMC) and CybELE. The event brought together industry representatives, public authorities, researchers, and civil society organizations from across Europe and Africa to foster international collaboration on best practices and innovative technologies for monitoring tailings storage facilities (TSFs) and waste sites.

The programme opened with welcoming remarks from Álvaro Serrano, President of ISMC, followed by a presentation of the GAIA-TSF project’s strategic projections for raw materials by Dr. Dr. HC. Santiago Cuesta-López, ISMC General Director.

The partners of the GAIA consortium presented the first outputs of the project through two key sessions on:

• Critical operational practices and monitoring variables for TSFs and waste management (TU Delft, University of the Witwatersrand).

  
  

• The application of Earth Observation (EO) technologies and Machine Learning (ML) for early detection and risk mitigation (University of the Witwatersrand, CybELE, Czech Technical University).

The audience of stakeholders was given the opportunity to provide feedback on the current best practices in operation and the innovation landscape in the field through two interactive sessions moderated by ISMC.

Stakeholder Sessions

The workshop concluded with two stakeholder sessions that broadened the debate by providing a multi-stakeholder perspective:

• Stakeholder Perspectives on Key Opportunities and Challenges in TSF and Waste Monitoring, with contributions from Junta de Andalucía, Tharsis Mining, Sandfire MATSA, University of the Witwatersrand, and the TERRAVISION Project.

  
  

• Repurposing Mine Tailings for a Sustainable CRM Value Chain, led by Virginia Rodríguez Gómez (IGME-CSIC) and Juan Manuel Pons (Senior Consultant Geologist for Atalaya Mining), which assessed the recovery potential of critical raw materials from abandoned mining waste in Spain, outlining the state of the art, future directions, and key challenges.

From Reactive to Proactive Approaches

A central conclusion of the workshop was the importance of moving from reactive to proactive approaches in TSF and waste site monitoring. EO and ML technologies provide the capability to conduct continuous, scalable, and cost-effective monitoring, improving risk management and environmental performance while reinforcing the mining sector’s social license to operate.

Next Steps

The GAIA-TSF project will continue to collaborate with stakeholders to refine and validate its prototype EO- and ML-based system for TSF and waste site monitoring.

A dedicated webpage with the presentations from the workshop will be shared soon.