77 resulting divergence erodes trust, weakens culture, and undermines both safety and productivity, while conventional process KPIs can mask declining control quality. The paper argues that heightened ESG and sustainability attention post-2015 unintentionally de-emphasised strategic safety leadership, driving incremental system embellishment instead of simplification and renewal. The authors propose a “fatality prevention reset”: a zero-based, workforce-co-designed streamlining of safety system portfolios, strengthened safety function mandate, deeper operational collaboration, and locally tailored approaches that integrate contractors—positioning fatality elimination as both a moral imperative and a productivity catalyst. KEYWORDS Fatality elimination, safety system complexity, workforce demographics transition, contractor management, frontline usability, safety bureaucracy, language and literacy barriers, safety culture and trust, strategic safety leadership, zero-based redesign, bottom-up change management, operational integration CONTEXT AND PROBLEM STATEMENT Mining and metals has historically recorded one of the highest workplace fatality rates of any major industry. In the 10–15 years leading up to 2015, many leading companies made material advances in fatality prevention—most notably by distinguishing injury reduction from fatality elimination, introducing critical risk management, and investing in organisational culture and operating models. Those innovations continued to deliver benefits as they were embedded across operations after 2015. However, from around 2015 onward, corporate HSE strategy and investment attention increasingly shifted toward wider sustainability requirements (ESG, decarbonisation, standards, certification, and disclosure). While important, this shift coincided with a reduction in new fatality prevention development and enterprise-wide improvement energy.
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