Sotirios Kamenopoulos, "Development of a framework and a decision support system for the sustainable exploitation of rare earth elements", Doctoral Dissertation, School of Mineral Resources Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece, 2017
https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.67349
The scope of this dissertation is the following: (a) to provide an insight and make efforts to highlight the multi-dimensional global importance of REEs, (b) to set the starting point and discuss potential important steps in a roadmap which may provide essential principles/best practices to sustainable mining of REEs, (c) to identify existing indicator sets and to lay out the importance of effective communication in both estimating a mine’s contribution to sustainable development and gaining social license to operate, (d) to propose the adoption of a framework that can be used to guide the extraction of Rare Earth Elements under Sustainable Development principles, and (e) to propose a new hybrid Decision Support tool which features an integrated assessment of Sustainable Development issues as they apply to mining projects. The proposed DSS framework named “ACROPOLIS DSS”, can be used to assist involved stakeholders in critical decisions, especially when addressing issues such as stakeholder participation, transparency, and trade-offs. The proposed DSS is based on Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis combined with Multi-Attribute Utility Theory.