Authors: Nick Weitao Rong¹, Jaime Cathcart¹, Greg Smyth¹
Conference: 2026 BC Mine Reclamation Symposium
Date: September 21-24, 2026

¹ Knight Piésold Ltd., Vancouver, BC, Canada

ABSTRACT

Climate change has important implications for mine water management and reclamation engineering design. Recent provincial guidance in British Columbia has extended climate-adaptation expectations to mine reclamation. This includes the Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals’ reclamation planning guidance and the more recent edition of the Joint Application Information Requirements. So far, that guidance has emphasized the ecological side of post-mining landscapes. In parallel, Engineers and Geoscientists British Columbia (EGBC) has published professional practice guidelines on climate change in flood assessments, dam safety reviews, and infrastructure design. These engineering requirements can be aligned with closure planning through a single workflow that connects climate science, hydrologic modelling, and reclamation design. This paper describes such a workflow: characterizing historical climate and streamflow non-stationarity, selecting global climate model ensembles and emission scenarios, generating future baseline streamflow series through rainfall-runoff modelling, and propagating climate signals through site-wide water balance, groundwater, and water quality models. A central concept is the future baseline, a climate-change-affected streamflow series free of mine-induced alterations, which is the benchmark for evaluating post-closure designs. Examples from recent projects in British Columbia, Yukon, and South America illustrate typical climate-change signals at mine closure: earlier freshet, bi-modal hydrologic regimes, higher winter baseflow, and a shift in governing design events from snowmelt volume to rainfall intensity. It complements ecology-focused reclamation guidance by addressing the water-cycle foundation that post-mining landscape outcomes depend on.

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