TERRA

Tertiary Education in Sustainable Resource Extraction

Mineral raw materials are critical for renewable energy technologies and achieving the goals of the European Green Deal. The European Union wants to strengthen the sustainable and responsible domestic sourcing of mineral raw materials. To achieve this, the growing demand for experts in this field must be met. The TERRA project aims to address those challenges by bringing together key players of Europe’s mining and mineral raw materials education and further strengthen the European Mining Course (EMC, www.emc-master.eu) as an international triple degree master program.

The TERRA consortium consists beside the MRE of the two EMC partners MU Leoben and Aalto University. Together, an Academic Expert Network with further important persons from the European mining education is to be founded, an academic conference will be organized and additionally the EMC will be further improved and adapted to current requirements.   

As an overarching goal, TERRA is focusing on the fight against climate change, without responsible mineral raw materials there can be no clean energy transition. But the supply of mineral raw materials must be made more sustainable and responsible throughout Europe. To meet this challenge, the mining industry needs well-trained university graduates. Mining programs across Europe face similar challenges with decreasing numbers of students and difficulties to offer the full range of relevant topics at their own university. To tackle those challenges, the TERRA project is working on modernizing innovative learning and teaching methods and promoting cooperation between universities. The existing structures and experiences of the three project partners of the renowned European Mining Courses (EMC) and the Federation of European Mineral Programs (FEMP) serve as a sound basis for this.

The TERRA project envisages to achieve a number of results to address the challenges of European mining engineering education and thus supply Europe with sufficient and well educated future decisionmakers:

• A database for students with information about personal career and educational opportunities across Europe
• An Academic Expert Network, bringing together key players of the educational landscape and tackle common challenges together
• An academic conference, facilitating the direct collaboration between key players in Europe’s mining education
• Benchmarking and improving the EMC curriculum with demands from industry, governmental bodies, educational institutions and students and thus further increase the quality of the triple degree program
• Creating a summer school as a joint module between the 3 partner universities, opening up to participants outside of EMC

TERRA will have a major impact on the mineral raw material education landscape. The results of TERRA will have a lasting impact driven by the sound dissemination and perpetuation plan. TERRA will ultimately improve the sustainable supply of minerals and thus also fight climate change by surcing a clean energy transition with responsible mineral raw materials.