Over the past decade, social and environmental impacts of mining operations gained more and more attention.The overall environmental impact of mining increased because of growing global raw material use as well as decreasing average ore grades. At the same time, mining-related social grievances and community concerns reduced the public acceptance of mining operations worldwide. This non-compliance with social and environmental requirements generates high costs (Franks et al, 2014). It may disrupt or even prevent mining operations and potentially affect regional or global supply. Other than economic impacts, reputational impacts can cause a loss of trust and of the social license to operate (SLO) in mining. These impacts may not be limited to the directly involved parties but can also affect the mining sector as a whole as well as companies in the downstream supply chain (Dashwood, 2013). Therefore, the SLO is considered as one of the most important current business risks in the mining sector (EY, 2018).Raw material criticality assessments represent a tool for policy makers and companies to evaluate supply risks of raw materials and the associated vulnerability. Recent criticality assessment methods focus on economic and political aspects, but social and environmental aspects are often not taken into account (Dewulf et al, 2016). CITATION:Khnel, K, Schtte, P, Bach, V, Franken, G, Dorner, U and Finkbeiner, M, 2019. Promoting the social license to operate through integrating social and environmental aspects in criticality assessments, in Proceedings 9th International Conference on Sustainable Development in the Minerals Industry, pp 8992 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).