**1. Introduction**

Occupational safety remains a priority for a grea<sup>t</sup> number of countries. Successful solutions to issues of labor safety and measures aimed at reducing the occupational injury rates influence the production efficiency and the product's cost effectiveness. Neglect or inattention towards labor safety can lead to not only technical and economic losses, but also to social ones [1].

Occupational safety issues are most relevant for the mining industry, in which the majority of production facilities are classified as hazardous. If we consider the occupational injury rate to be an indicator of occupational safety, calculated as the total number of injuries divided by the total number of workers, then the occupational risks for the mining industry would be 4–5 times higher than their average levels in other Russian industries.

Occupational injuries are even higher for the Arctic zone industries, where the miners are subject to polar stress syndrome and unfavorable environmental living conditions that result from the habitation zones being located next to the mining areas. Such conditions include low air temperatures, high precipitation, strong winds, polar nights, lack of ultraviolet radiation, comparatively high air and water pollution levels, and also excessive noise and vibration levels [2]. The polls of the Arctic zone inhabitants show interesting results. Two age groups of the Arctic zone inhabitants participated in the sociological survey, "youth"—whose age was between 25 and 44—as well as "the elderly"—those older

**Citation:** Gendler, S.; Prokhorova, E. Risk-Based Methodology for Determining Priority Directions for Improving Occupational Safety in the Mining Industry of the Arctic Zone. *Resources* **2021**, *10*, 20. https:// doi.org/10.3390/resources10030020

Academic Editors: Pavel Tcvetkov, Nikolay Didenko and Eleni Iacovidou

Received: 18 December 2020 Accepted: 24 February 2021 Published: 1 March 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

than 60 years old. Regardless of age, during polar nights, 87% of the young people and 80% of the elderly reported feeling drowsy and depressed. Furthermore, 54% of the young people and 60% of the elderly participants reported high levels of stress, and 47% and 50% of them (respectively) reported feeling unwell. During the polar nights, 87% of young people and 80% of the elderly reportedly suffer from excessive agitation, which leads to insomnia. The low temperatures of the Arctic zone were difficult to tolerate for 60% of the young people and 80% of the elderly. Additionally, 20% of the young people and 50% of the elderly reportedly feel the changes in atmospheric pressure. Taken together, these negative environmental factors cause irreversible changes to people's mental and physical conditions, which leads to increased injury risks compared to other regions of Russia.

These high injury risks inhibit exploration of the Arctic zone's mineral deposits, which are strewn across an area of 3.1 million sq. km—18% of Russia's total area [3].

As per the annex to the Decree of the President of Russian Federation No. 296 dated 2 May 2014, the land area of the Arctic zone includes: Murmansk region, Nenets Autonomous Area, Chukotka Autonomous District, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, Komi Republic, Republic of Karelia, Sakha Republic (Yakutia), Krasnoyarsk Territory, Arkhangelsk Region, and the lands and islands located in the Arctic ocean as specified by the Decree of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR (dated 15 April 1926) "On declaring the lands and islands of the Arctic oceans the territories of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" and other USSR acts [4] (Figure 1).

**Figure 1.** The Arctic zone of the Russian Federation. 1—Murmansk region; 2—Republic of Karelia; 3—Arkhangelsk region; 4—Nenets Autonomous Area; 5—Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District; 6—Krasnoyarsk Territory; 7—Sakha Republic (Yakutia); 8—Chukotka Autonomous District; 9—Komi Republic (as part of Vorkuta City District).

The Arctic zone accounts for 90% of Russia's nickel and cobalt production, 60% of copper, over 96% of platinum metals, and around 80% of natural gas and 60% of oil production (Figure 2). When it comes to reserves of hydrocarbons, the zone's share becomes even larger. The Arctic shelf could be considered a strategic reserve for strengthening Russia's resource security [4–6].

Efficient development of natural resources is impossible without proper labor safety standards having been implemented in mining enterprises, some of which incorporate multiple companies (i.e., vertically integrated companies).

Injury prevention and occupational disease and illness prevention have been the topic of many studies by Russian and foreign scientists [7–10]. Importantly, when it comes to risk assessment, Russian methodology involves the use of qualitative indices that characterize various risk types (personal risk, collective risk, economic risk, expected value of damages) [11].

**Figure 2.** Share of the Arctic zone's mineral deposits in the total of Russia's mineral reserves.

In Finland, for instance, the Elmeri method of occupational safety assessment [12] has become widely used. This method allows for the determination of the likelihood of occurrence of conditions leading to injury or occupational diseases. It is based on observations on labor safety aspects, such as how orderly the workplaces are, how safe the machinery exploitation is, what personal protection equipment the workers use, how ergonomic the work processes are, and what the labor hygiene and sanitation practices are. All of these components are categorized into seven item groups: safety behavior, order and tidiness, machine safety, industrial hygiene, ergonomics, walkways, and first aid and fire safety. Each group is rated from "bad" to "good". "Good" means the group meets the minimal legal requirements and is in line with positive safety practices of the company in question. The Elmeri index is calculated as a ratio of the "good" scores to the total number of item groups, and it ranges from 0 to 100. As such, a score of 60% indicates that a potential injury risk from non-compliance with the occupational safety standards equals 40%.

The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) permits use of different methods for occupational safety assessment. The priority in each case is to select the most suitable method. The organization provides an approximate step-by-step guide for risk assessment [13,14]. Based on it, they have developed forms that make it possible to properly document procedures and decision-making processes. However, it must be noted that, despite the existence of a sizeable body of work (by both national and foreign scientists) related to the matter of occupational safety assessment, the issue of injury risk assessment with the subsequent selection of priority avenues for lowering the risk levels remains understudied.

The methods of risk assessment such as FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis), HAZOP (Hazard and operability studies), and FTA (Fault Tree Analysis) are used in the USA. The HAZOR method, for example, is a risk assessment procedure consisting of the process of detailing and identifying operational disturbances and malfunctions of the equipment as well as a process, a production unit or a system resulting in some undesirable consequences [15]. Similar risk assessment procedures are applied in countries such as Sweden and Norway [16].

A similar standard for determining the risk of occupational injuries was used in the research by Russian scientists [17]. These studies are based on correlation analysis of the assessment of occupational injury risks. However, they do not take the features of the Arctic zone of Russia into full consideration. The methodology proposed differs from the known ones as it considers the impact of the adverse environmental factors on the risk of injuries and also includes an additional indicator—the average risk of injuries for the

period under consideration, allowing for a more complete description of the comparative dynamics of occupational injury risk rates.

The versatility of the proposed methodology for assessing the risk of occupational injuries and determining priority directions for its reduction makes it possible to extend this methodology for use in other mining enterprises located in different climates and characterized by various mining and engineering conditions.

However, it should be noted that despite a significant number of studies (by both domestic and foreign scientists) related to the issue of assessing labor safety for various industries, the problem of assessing the risk of injuries in the Arctic zone with the subsequent selection of priority areas for its reduction has not been fully studied.

The correlation analysis of published statistical data characterising occupational safety, both in the regions of the Arctic zone and in the specific company, as an example, the mining areas of the Kirov branch of "Apatit", JSC is considered to be an advantage of the risk-based methodology proposed in the paper.

The fatal injury risk indicator has been used to conduct a comparative analysis of accidents in the industries of the countries located in areas with a climate similar to that of the Arctic zone of Russia (Figure 3) [18].

**Figure 3.** Fatal injury risk for different countries.

The data presented in the figure indicate that the highest fatal injury risk is evident for the Arctic zone of Russia, which stresses the importance of studying this issue, specifically for the Russian Federation.

However, the risk also remains high for other countries. As a result, the risk-based methodology for determining priority directions for reducing the occupational injury rate will be useful for other countries with a similar climate.

The present study owes its relevance to the existing need to decrease the occupational injury rates in the mining industry of Russia's Arctic zone, which helps optimize investments in occupational safety.

The goal of the present study is to provide a risk-based approach for selecting priority directions for occupational injury risk prevention in the mining industry of the Arctic zone.

The practical significance of the study lies in the development of an occupational risk assessment methodology that takes into account the background risk levels in calculations of injury rates caused by labor conditions. The proposed methodology also determines the relative and absolute shifts in occupational injury risk levels. The "basic injury rate matrix", built based on these parameters, allows for the visualisation of the correlation analysis of injury rates in vertically integrated companies and facilitates selection of priority avenues for lowering the injury rates and improving occupational safety.

We use the injury risk level—calculated as the ratio of the injury rate to the total region population number—as a primary indicator of labor safety.

To exemplify the use of the developed methodology, we use it to assess the situation at the mines of the Kirov branch of "Apatit", JSC (located in Murmansk), which belongs to the Arctic zone as per the Decree of the President of Russian Federation No. 296 dated 2 May 2014 [19].
