In in its sixth annual Tracking the Trends report, the professional services firm highlighted cost pressures along with low commodity prices, supply-demand imbalances and decreased productivity levels as ongoing issues for the coming year.

Deloitte Australia national mining leaders Nicki Ivory and Reuben Saayman said mining companies needed to address three areas in particular - sustainable cost practices and productivity, innovation across existing operations and capital management.

"The high cost of doing business again tops the trend list - for the third year straight," Ivory said.

"While the industry can't change global economic trends, miners can change the way they operate.

"But the thinking on costs needs to go well beyond the low hanging fruit toward developing innovative and sustainable cost management practices.

"Business innovation will help deliver those sustainable savings as long as miners build innovation into their DNA.

"And rather than waiting out the market swing, they need to evolve by adopting processes, technologies and mindsets necessary to strengthen their long-term operations and deliver value to their shareholders."

The report emphasised that while committing to cost-efficiency was important, it was not enough.

Deloitte described the macro forces weighing on the mining industry as a seismic shift rather than a pendulum swing - the first such recalibration in recent memory and a test for companies' long-term survival.

Noting that radical shifts in the economic environment called for radical policy changes, the report focused on engaging in sustainable cost reduction rather than reactive cost-cutting, relentless focus on productivity, "right-sizing" projects, modular construction and new forms of innovation.

"The report makes it clear that change and volatility are the new normal for the sector," Saayman said.

"These global trends cannot be changed by miners and they need to be understood and these risks need to be mitigated through changes in the way miners do business.

"The short-term measures such as costs cutting, retrenchments and supply chain pressure will not be enough to deal with the paradigm shift that is required for sustainable long-term growth.

"Those that respond through business model changes will be in a position of strength to take advantage of the opportunities available in the market."

The top 10 global trends identified in the report are:

• The cost of contraction: mining productivity hits new lows
• Matching supply to demand: market imbalances wreak commodity price havoc
• The remaking of mining: exploring the innovation imperative
• Finding funding: debt up, deals down and juniors fight for survival
• The project pipeline stutters: record impairments call capital allocation practices into question
• Power to the people: local community demands ramp up
• Resource nationalism spreads: government relations marked by rising hostility
• Crackdown on corruption: a zero tolerance regulatory environment complicates compliance
• Changing the safety equation: from zero harm to zero fatalities
• A dearth of skills: the talent gap slinks into executive suites.

Deloitte warned mining companies that breaking out of traditional responses to these pressures would be neither easy nor intuitive.

"For decades, the industry has typically waited out market swings, with the assurance that commodity prices would eventually rebound," the report said.

"They will again this time too. Some industry analysts even anticipate more robust recovery by the second half of 2014.

"But which companies and which management teams, will be knocked out of the ring before we get there?"