UE Mineral Resources and Sustainable Development

This teaching unit will introduce the students to the new opportunities for mining exploration in Europe. In the current environment of high-metal demand and exhaustion of historically important metal resources, different sources of metals and technologies to extract metal will have to be found: mining deeper primary mineral resources, using new type of ore, or returning to recover extractable minerals from abandoned mines. The idea of this unit is to train students to identify such sustainable opportunities using complex sets of geological, historical, geographical, and economical data. Innovation in data visualisualization and integration will be of prior importance. We develop a new pedagogic approach based on an educational crowd-sourcing contest. The students will work co-operatively on an unstructured problem, without a pre-ordained “right” answer, where they will hone both their university-acquired or self-taught skillsets into application that the minerals exploration industry requires. We aim at strengthening MSc students creativity, entrepreneurship and skills for the sustainable development of mineral resources in Europe. We train the next generation of mineral resource managers (not only geologists) to develop new active environmental and societal strategy for sustainably harnessing mineral resources in Europe