378 offs between immediate disposal costs and long-term recovery options. 5.3 Life cycle and low-carbon opportunities The sustainability benefits of dry stacking must be evaluated in a life cycle perspective, balancing additional energy use in filtration and transport against reduced water consumption, lower failure risk and circularity gains. Life cycle assessment (LCA) following ISO 14040, combined with databases such as Ecoinvent (Ecoinvent Association, 2023), provides a structured way to compare conventional slurry ponds, thickened and paste tailings, and filtered dry stacks under different climatic and operational conditions. Preliminary LCA work and near-zero-waste studies suggest that, when designed appropriately, dry stacking can contribute to lower overall environmental impacts by reducing seepage and catastrophic failure risk (Sahu et al., 2020; SYKE, 2022), enabling reuse of tailings in products and lowering long-term water and land footprints. At the same time, filtration energy, additional equipment and possible heating requirements in cold climates can increase operational emissions. Integrating climate-scenario analysis, hydrological modeling and LCA as proposed in ongoing research on northern dry stacking offers a pathway to quantify these trade-offs and to identify design configurations that are both climate-resilient and compatible with carbon-neutral mining targets. 6. REQUIREMENTS AND RESEARCH AGENDA FOR CLIMATE-RESILIENT DRY STACKING The previous sections have shown that the performance of dry-stacked tailings in Arctic and sub-Arctic environments depends on a tight interplay between material properties, climate, dewatering technology and operational practice. To move from promising case studies to robust, climate-resilient deployment at scale, a set of design and research requirements must be addressed in an integrated way. 6.1 Design principles for climate-resilient dry stacking Climate-resilient dry stacking in northern conditions requires going beyond a “static design” approach and instead adopting adaptive design principles that explicitly account for variability and change in weather and climate (Tuomela, 2022; Andersland & Ladanyi, 2004). Key elements include: • Robust material characterization and moisture window definition. Earlystage testing should quantify how particle size distribution, mineralogy and fines content affect moisture–density relationships, frost susceptibility and trafficability. This supports defining a realistic target moisture window and compaction specification that can be maintained under variable operating conditions. • Layered construction with conservative geometries. Lift thickness, slope
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