Mining companies must improve their governance and ensure they are diverse at the board level if they are to meet their ESG objectives in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to business analysts GlobalData.

The company said ESG issues are the most critical challenge the mining industry will face in the next decade due to demands from governments, regulators and the media.

Luke Gowland, analyst, GlobalData, said to meet these challenges, stakeholders in the mining industry must improve how they operate and be more engaged with their workforce.

Gowland continued that corporate boards need to make sure their company performs while keeping ESG at the top of the agenda and ensure decision-makers have diverse backgrounds to avoid shareholder discontent.

"By appointing a more diverse range of directors to a board and empowering them, a company is more likely to be in tune with its employee base, a broad range of stakeholders, and society," Gowland claimed.

Gowland explained that it is "easy to find examples of lacklustre governance in mining" but much harder to find "exemplary" case studies and that companies that perform poorly likely do so because of bad governance.