The post-Brumadinho era reshaped tailings management globally. Six years on from the GISTM (Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management) coming into force, the technology stack at most major Australian operations has changed substantially.

InSAR satellite monitoring is now standard at every tier-one operation. Real-time pore pressure and piezometer networks feed into dashboards that the operations team and the independent tailings reviewer (ITR) both watch. Drone-based stockpile and dam crest scanning is routine.

What’s changed in 2026 versus 2024 is the integration. The early reform push added monitoring layers without much thought to how they’d be consumed. Now operators are getting better at fusing the geotechnical data with weather forecasts, seismic monitoring, and operational throughput data into something actually actionable.

The honest critique is that a lot of mid-tier operators are still behind. The big players have fully integrated tailings risk dashboards. The mid-tier still relies on monthly reports from consultants. That gap matters because when something does shift, you find out fast or you find out slow, and slow has consequences.

Filtered and dry-stack tailings continue to grow as a percentage of new project designs. The economics still don’t work for very large operations at full conversion, but for new mid-sized projects, dry-stack is increasingly the default. Energy and water are the trade-off, and on the energy side, several Australian projects are pairing dry-stack with on-site solar to make the numbers work.

The next inflection point is probably AI-driven anomaly detection on the monitoring data. A few vendors are pitching it. The early evidence suggests it’s useful as a flagging tool but still needs human geotechnical review before any action. That seems right. Tailings is not the place to fully trust an algorithm.