It allows companies and their investors to estimate the planetary-scale impact of the company’s land use, its water consumption and its carbon emissions. As such it can provide a powerful tool to identify assets within a company that have a high Earth System Impact and should be prioritized for various improvement measures. They assessed Earth System Impact for a sample of ten firms comprising the five largest mining companies in the precious metal mining sector and the non-precious metal mining sector, respectively. “We found that many mining assets have non-negligible impacts on land and water. Specifically, the research finds that very similar types of activities can have widely different impacts on the earth system depending on where they are located.