92 guidelines that position mitigation and climate resilience as planning pillars toward 2050 time horizons (Ley Marco de Cambio Climático, 2022). In a country where copper mine planning is conducted under structural water constraints, high territorial sensitivity, and growing exposure to climate hazards, the ranking can also be interpreted as a practical signal of where strategic pressures currently concentrate in socioenvironmental assessment. In this sense, the fact that energy consumption and extreme climate events are ranked above the remaining criteria indicates that expert judgment assigns greater relative weight to factors that operate as systemic drivers of risk over time, within a context of energy transition and climate adaptation. In particular, this prioritization is consistent with national decarbonization and energy-transition orientations, which further underscore the relevance of energy intensity and its associated externalities in performance and risk assessments (Ministerio de Energía, 2024). Nevertheless, the spatial criteria associated with territorial sensitivity C4, C5, and C6 remain relevant because they capture the contextual nature of socio-environmental risk. Proximity to population centers and water resources, as well as the relationship between the two, act as proxies for territorial vulnerability and the potential amplification of risk, with implications for social license and conflict, particularly in areas facing water competition. By contrast, the lower weight of surface disturbance (C1) with 9.841% may indicate that, within the compared set, this criterion is perceived as relatively more manageable or partially represented by other dimensions, without implying irrelevance, but rather a lower relative priority under aggregated judgment. Regarding consistency, the results reported in Table 4 indicate that the group prioritization reflects a stable preference structure under the standard acceptance threshold (CR ≤ 0.10), supporting the use of the derived weights as a defensible basis for the proposed integrated indicator. Nevertheless, because the method relies on expert judgment, results remain sensitive to panel composition and reference frames, which may introduce sector-specific emphases when comparing criteria without shared metrics. From an application standpoint, AHP provides explicit and replicable weights to structure an indicator based on normalized scores; however, implementation requires clear measurement and normalization rules and should be validated through sensitivity and stability analyses under plausible variations in expert inputs and score parameterization. 6.- CONCLUSIONS In this work, we propose a decision-support approach to integrate socio-environmental criteria associated with strategic decisions on the transition from open-pit to underground mining. This transition represents one of the most relevant decisions in medium- to long-term mine planning, given its technical implications and potential effects on the territory and surrounding environment. Evaluating such a decision requires considering multiple heterogeneous dimensions, including environmental and social factors, which are not always explicitly weighted within traditional assessment frameworks. In this context, the problem is
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