ICMM’s 2026 Critical Control Management Guide 

The International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) released its updated Critical Control Management: Good Practice Guide in April 2026, merging prior resources into a single, practical framework for preventing serious incidents in mining operations. 

This guide addresses persistent challenges like fatalities from rockfalls, fires, and exposures by focusing on essential controls that must work to avert harm. 

Benefits for Organisations 

CCM shifts from compliance to performance-driven prevention, building confidence in controls through frontline clarity and systemic accountability. 

For safety leaders, it fosters mature programs via nine steps: identifying MUEs/controls, defining performance, assigning owners, verifying, and responding to failures. 

ICMM CEO Rohitesh Dhawan calls it a “renewed commitment” to eliminate fatalities. 

Key Updates in 2026 Edition 

ICMM incorporated insights gathered from ten years of member company implementation experiences and real-world operational applications across the global mining industry. Member companies contributed case studies, implementation experiences, and lessons learned that inform the guide’s enhanced content. 

This edition of the Good Practice Guide focuses more on organisational culture and frontline engagement. It recognises that safety performance relies as much on people and behaviours as on processes. 

Subtle changes include consolidation from separate guides to one unified guide and adding two practical new tools to help companies benchmark where they stand.  

1. One unified guide – the previously separate Good Practice Guide and Implementation Guide are merged into a single document. 

2. CCM as enterprise risk – formally elevated to sit alongside strategic and financial risks at the board level. 

3. Stronger governance and leadership direction – defined accountability with structured expectations for executives, not just site managers. 

4. New maturity assessment and readiness check tools – practical diagnostics to help organizations benchmark their current CCM capabilities. 

5. Sharper control identification and verification criteria – a refined nine-step framework that distinguishes truly critical controls from general safety measures. It strengthens the criteria for identifying controls, selecting critical controls, and offers clearer, more practical guidance for defining, implementing, and verifying them. 

6. Safety culture and frontline engagement – a new emphasis on closing the gap between policy and practice, driven from the top down. 

The new guide builds on the 2015 performance requirements and now includes a more developed Critical Control Performance Specification or Standard, consisting of objectives, performance requirements, erosion factors, support activities and verification activities 

Access the full guide at ICMM CCM Guide.