Growth in mining hampered by a lack of geoscientists

Australia is often called the “Lucky Country,” and it is not just a good slogan, it is true. Australia is one of the last nations on earth where low population and abundant natural resources can support a western, resource-dependent lifestyle - the type to which we have become accustomed - and still protect our natural environment by allowing future development to be carried out in a sustainable way. However, our “sustainable” future is in jeopardy.

While everyone is familiar with the current skills crisis - there are too few tradesmen, skilled labourers, nurses, and so on - few people outside of the geoscience industries have recognised the severe shortage of university-trained professionals in those industries. Australian universities currently are not producing enough geoscience professionals to meet demand by employers.

And now, more ominously, there is an increasing shortfall in academic geoscientists at Australia’s universities, and that shortfall directly jeopardises our ability to train the future geoscientists that Australia requires. Under the current government university funding model, low student numbers in the geosciences are causing the down-sizing and or closure of geoscience departments, so drastically limiting the breadth of geoscience expertise and experience available in Australia’s university sector.

If the downward trend continues, it may become impossible to meet Australia’s future educational, training and professional needs in this critical area.

So, why should we be worried? Geoscience is fundamentally important to Australia’s future in three ways:

1. geological resources drive a large percentage of the nation’s economy;
2. sustainable development, encompassing environmental protection, depends heavily upon geoscience; and
3. geoscientists produce most of the data that are required to understand climate change.

The Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics reports that export earnings from mineral and energy resources in 2005-2006 were more than $90 billion and forecasts that those earnings will rise to $110 billion in 2006-2007. By comparison, farm commodities exports are forecast at $29.3 billion in 2006-2007.

The minerals and energy exploration industries (or extractive industries) that drive this huge part of the nation’s economy depend on professional geoscientists, both geologists and engineers. In addition to export earnings, the extractive industries provide direct tax and royalties to state and federal treasuries.

For example, the Queensland Resources Council estimates that Queensland’s extractive industries will contribute more than $1.5 billion in direct royalties to the state government next year.

Other commonly overlooked benefits include direct contributions to infrastructure, such as roads, ports and rail systems, which are heavily dependent on users’ fees from extractive industries; and it is worthy of note that extractive industries are particularly important in rural and regional Australia. In many cases these industries are responsible for a large percentage of regional economic development and infrastructure: entire cities in rural Australia owe their existence to the extractive industries.

But it is not all about economics. Although geoscience is commonly linked solely with the extractive industries, it is in fact a highly diverse field, encompassing the core disciplines in areas such as hydrology (water supply and quality), catchment and waterways management, mine remediation, hazard analysis (earthquakes, tsunamis, floods), geotechnical analysis for construction, soil conservation, inland salinity, coastal erosion, acid sulphate soils, and many others.

It is geoscientists who are playing the lead roles in research to understand our changing climate. The record of climate change over the last million years is contained in sediments from lakes and the deep ocean, corals from the Great Barrier Reef, stalagmites from caves, and ice cores from glaciers; all are studied by geoscientists.

At the same time, palaeontologists are documenting the effects of recent climate change on Australia’s ancient faunas and ecosystems. Without such data we cannot begin to predict Australia’s future climate or its likely effects on our environment.

However, we currently are producing fewer professional geoscientists than are retiring from industry due to a demographic bulge in the average age of the professional workforce (currently well over 50 years).

On top of that, the Minerals Council of Australia has concluded that growth in the mining industry over the next decade will lead to the need about 7,600 new geologists and engineers, and those figures do not include the oil and gas industries. As our most skilled and experienced professionals retire, it is unlikely that they will be replaced in number, and it is probably impossible for them to be replaced in kind.

Disturbingly, despite the great number of jobs and incredibly high salaries for new and recent geoscience graduates (for example, $55,000 to more than $100,000 a year), student numbers are low. These low student numbers have impacted on universities at the same time as a wave of economic rationalisation in university funding.

Universities are now funded on a formula based primarily on student numbers. There is no strategic oversight to ensure that critical skills will be taught across the nation; offerings are increasingly market driven and based on the decisions of enrolling high school students. Disciplines that are expensive to teach and have low student numbers, such as science and engineering, provide inadequate income and increasingly are viewed as drains on struggling university budgets.

The net result has been downsizing of teaching staff, merging of many departments into combined schools with other disciplines, and the closing of entire departments. Of 28 geoscience departments in Australian universities in 1990, only five independent geoscience departments remain. In Queensland, the last independent School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University merged this year into a combined School of Earth and Environmental Science. Hence, a state that single-handedly ranks among the largest coal exporting nations in the world, lacks an independent geology department in any of its universities.

Also worrying is the fact that the degradation of university departments in the geosciences has been a global phenomenon. For example, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists reported that only 430 geologists graduated with Bachelors degrees in the United States in 2005! That compares to just over 100 geology graduates in Australia over the same time interval according to the Department of Education Science and Training. Global competition for geoscientists will only increase.

So why are student numbers so low when jobs are so plentiful and salaries are so high?

First, employment in the extractive industries has traditionally followed global economic cycles, and the last major downturn in the late 1990s left many professionals seeking other lines of employment. However, that cyclicity in employment is now buffered by the bulge in retirement-aged professionals and increasing levels of employment in the environmental sector.

Second, there is a poor public perception of the extractive industries, based largely on one-sided, poorly informed and unfair criticism by parts of the environmental movement. Only a tiny fraction of Australian land is affected by the “dreaded” mining industry. In reality, agriculture and urban sprawl do far more environmental damage. Strip mines may be unsightly, but they are ephemeral. They must be rehabilitated and, as far as possible, returned to native habitat once the mine runs its course. Land utilised for agriculture and for human occupation and development, on the other hand, remains degraded forever.

And can we do without the extractive industries? Look around you wherever you are and remove all the stone, cement, bricks and other ceramics, all the metals, glass and even plastics (which are petroleum-based), and what do you have left? You’re sitting amid wooden boards with nothing to hold them together, soft paper, and natural fibers like wool and cotton.

That is the house of cards we live in without the extractive industries, and never mind energy. You’ll be in the dark, because there will be almost no power generation, no wires to conduct electricity anyway, no solar cells, and not even a candle, because candle wax, like plastics, is a product of petroleum. And by the way, the wood came from logging a natural habitat or from a plantation that replaced a destroyed natural habitat. The extractive industries are not the environmental villains here; we share that distinction collectively.

Third, geosciences are poorly understood by Australian students because they are very rarely taught in high school. In Queensland only 20 of 700 high schools taught geology units other than modules buried in multi-strand science courses in 2005. Research has shown that students are unlikely to enter universities to major in subject areas that they are unfamiliar with. Hence, geology is poorly subscribed; most students shift into geology from other majors after they entered the university to study a different, but more familiar field of science. The closure of even one geoscience department removes a number of potential professionals from the future labour force.

So what can be done? We must increase the numbers of geoscience students in surviving geoscience programs, both to produce more graduates, and to help those departments survive. If you know any bright high school students nearing graduation who want challenging, well-paid careers, and love the out of doors, tell them about geoscience. You can also lobby your state education boards to have geosciences added more visibly to school curricula. Everyone lives on this planet and would benefit from knowing more about how it works.

We must also encourage industry to support our universities. While industry has endowed a few teaching chairs in mineral-related engineering and recently, petroleum geology, much more direct support of university departments is needed, particularly for geology, which has received far less attention than engineering. With high commodities prices and record company profits, there has never been a better time for industry to invest in the training of their future work forces.

Finally, we must encourage the federal government to adequately fund university disciplines that are critical for long-term sustainability, even where student numbers are typically low. It must do more to ensure that critical teaching departments remain viable in the face of low student numbers.

The “bums on seats” funding model is not a strategy for future needs. As with brain surgeons and other technical specialists, we may not need to produce thousands of geologists or mining engineers every year (although we currently may need those numbers), but we need to ensure the steady supply of a smaller number of high quality, well educated professionals every year. The current university funding model makes that outcome increasingly difficult.

So, support your university system. You may never obtain or need a university degree yourself, but the quality of your life commonly depends on people who have one. A well-funded tertiary education system is not a luxury; it is a necessity. Our future is at risk without it.