دانلود رایگان مقاله معدن و تغییرات آب و هوایی: بررسی و چارچوبی برای تجزیه و تحلیل

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we demonstrate that climate change is critically important for the current and future status of mining activity and its impacts on surrounding communities and environments. We illustrate this through examples from Latin America, including a spatial analysis of the intersection between projected climate changes and existing mining operations. We then elaborate a framework to identify and investigate the relationships among mining, climate change, and public and private responses to them. The framework also notes the importance of political economy and learning processes to the forms taken by these relationships. Our paper then reports on a focused review of peer-reviewed publications that aims to identify the extent to which a core research literature on mining and climate change currently exists. We show that this literature is still very limited, but that the analysis that does exist can be encapsulated by the main elements of our framework. This enables us to describe the current structure of both peer-reviewed and policy research on mining and climate change, and identify areas for future research. In particular, we note the chronic absence of research on this relationship for the vast majority of developing countries, where some of the most serious vulnerabilities to climate change exist.

I. Climate change as an emerging driver of mining policy

On March 29, 2017, El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly unanimously passed a law banning metal mining in the country. “El Salvador makes history as first nation to impose blanket ban on metal mining” The Guardian (2017) stated, while The New York Times (2017) reported that “El Salvador, Prizing Water over Gold, Bans All Metal Mining.” Though passed by a left-of-center government of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), conservative, pro-market, anti-regulation lawmakers of El Salvador’s Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) also voted for the law. Reflecting on that vote, one of these ARENA legislators, Johnny Wright Sol, “who worked to persuade his businessfriendly party to support the law, said that climate change was already having an impact on El Salvador. ‘More than a theory or an uncertain science that it might have been 10 years ago, today for Salvadorans, it is a reality’”(New York Times, 2017).

El Salvador’s law points directly to the increasing significance of climate change for strategic decisions on the regulation of mining. For several years prior to the law, critics of the mining sector in El Salvador had been drawing attention to the vulnerability of the country’s water resources under conditions of climate change, and argued that to allow mining in the country would aggravate this vulnerability (Broad and Cavanagh, 2015; Spalding, 2013; Moran, 2005). A Strategic Environmental Assessment of the mining sector also noted that mining would use water resources that climate change would make scarcer, and that the increasing frequency of severe storms would threaten the failure of tailing dams and other mine infrastructure, with potentially serious consequences for water contamination (TAU, 2011; Bebbington et al., 2015).

Though perhaps an extreme example, the case of El Salvador demonstrates the significance of climate change for the future of the mining sector, particularly in water-constrained national environments. Indeed, even in a mining-country par excellence such as Chile, a senior executive of a leading global mining company insisted that climate change-related pressures on water and energy resources demand that the sector go through “a socio-technical regime change,” not only as an adaptive response, but also because in a context of climate change, “the forms of gaining legitimacy have changed.” A leader from Chile’s national mining sector expressed a similar view, arguing that innovations related to water and energy had to be accelerated, not least because in the future, companies and metals are likely to be assessed in terms of their climate footprint.