55 1. WATER STRESS AS A CONSTRAINT ON FUTURE MINERAL PRODUCTION Water availability is a critical factor for mining operations. It is required for extraction, mineral processing, and tailing management. Many mineral-rich regions already experience water scarcity and climate change is projected to reduce renewable water availability through changes in precipitation, surface runoff, and groundwater recharge. A sixth of critical mineral mines, including porphyry copper, are located in areas of high water stress. Copper production is, however, essential for electrification and renewable energy infrastructure, making supply sensitive to water constraints. A framework is developed that links climate-driven projections of water availability with process-based estimates of mineral water demand, enabling identification of spatial and temporal locations where water could constrain production. 2. A CLIMATE-INFORMED FRAMEWORK FOR ASSESSING MINING WATER RISK Assessing potential water constraints on mineral production requires combining climatedriven water availability with deposit-level water demand. The framework integrates global climate projections, hydrological modeling of surface and groundwater resources, and processbased water demand calculations. It provides a scalable representation of water stress in mining regions. 2.1 The HyIR Global Hydrological Aggregation Framework This work introduces HyIR (HYdrological and Industrial Resilience), a global-scale hydrological aggregator developed to quantify the evolution of water resources under climate change. HyIR is implemented as an open-source Python framework and is designed to ingest climate forcings from the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) general circulation models (GCMs) under Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). It represents water dynamics through three coupled components: surface water in rivers, surface water storage in lakes and reservoirs, and groundwater stored in aquifers. The framework explicitly represents hydrological processes and exchanges between these components, including runoff generation, river routing, surface storage changes, and groundwater recharge, allowing climate-driven variations in water storage and flows to be propagated consistently through the system. HyIR operates at the native spatial and temporal resolution of the climate forcings, typically on the order of 1° × 1° and monthly time steps, and produces simulations extending to 2100, subject to the length of the climate projections. The primary outputs of HyIR are spatially and temporally resolved time series of water storage volumes and storage changes for each hydrological component. In this study, the framework is applied using a single CMIP6 climate model and one Shared Socioeconomic Pathway to demonstrate the methodological capability of the approach rather than to provide probabilistic projections of future water availability. The
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