Sustainable Investment and Value Creation in Copper Mining: An Analysis from the ROSI Approach in the Chilean Mining Sector (ISVM)

Abstract

Chile’s mining industry, which underpins approximately 60 % of the country’s export revenues and serves as a central axis of global copper demand for the energy transition, faces an unprecedented structural transformation. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria have shifted from a complementary reference framework to a direct determinant of capital access, social license to operate, and market valuation for mining companies. Against this backdrop, this study takes a descriptive approach to examine the evolution of sustainability reporting and profitability among Chilean companies regulated by the Financial Market Commission (CMF) with exposure to the natural resources and energy sector, and proposes the MSRE model (Sustainability and Profitability in Natural Resource and Energy Companies) as a conceptual framework—not empirically validated in this study—for analyzing the channels through which sustainable investment could create value specifically in Chilean copper mining. Because large-scale copper mining in Chile largely operates under corporate structures that do not require individual CMF securities reporting—Codelco is an unlisted state-owned company, while Escondida, Los Pelambres, and other large operations are unlisted subsidiaries of foreign parent companies—the empirical analysis draws on an expanded sample of twelve CMF-regulated natural-resource and energy companies (Reyes Murillo, 2025), rather than a copper-mining-only panel. This methodological decision is made explicit and discussed as a central limitation (Sections 3.4 and 8). Descriptive data show a sustained increase in the number of CMF companies reporting SASB sustainability indicators between 2022 and 2023, coinciding with a 4.68 percentage-point increase in average profitability. This temporal coincidence is consistent with—though it does not demonstrate—the possibility that sustainability is associated with better financial performance; the descriptive design employed does not include correlation, regression, or significance tests, and therefore cannot establish causal or statistical associations between the two variables. Building on this descriptive evidence and the ROSI framework (Eckerle et al., 2020), the study proposes the MSRE model, identifying four theoretical channels through which sustainable investment could generate value in copper mining. Only the first channel is accompanied by an illustrative quantitative estimate; the remaining three are presented as literature-grounded conceptual propositions pending direct empirical testing