Mining & Sustainability: The Three Circles of Sustainable Development
Sustainability is arguably the most widely used environmental ‘buzzword’ of the past decade. It has been commonly used and misused to denote a variety of concepts. However, despite some confusion in its meaning, its overall premise has been embraced by regulators and by many industries, including mining.
Introduction
Opponents of mining commonly claim that it is not a sustainable activity. This might seem strange for an activity that has persisted since the Stone Age. Two arguments are used against mining being sustainable. Firstly, the fact that the minerals themselves are non-renewable suggests that, eventually, mineral stocks will be exhausted. There is abundant evidence to indicate that this situation will never arise. The second argument is that mining makes irreversible changes to the physical, ecological and social environment, which can not be sustained. However, the same argument could equally be applied to most of man’s other activities and indeed, to many natural events. The key here is that the benefits of mining (or other activity) should outweigh any negative impacts.
The concept of sustainability derives from the idea of sustainable development as popularized by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987.This commission was chaired by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, and is widely known as the Brundtland Commission. In the words of the Brundtland Report (WCED 1987), sustainable development means ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. It is in the context of this definition that the sustainability of mining is assessed in this paper. Clearly, the concept of sustainability will vary depending on what is being sustained. Sustainable agriculture, for example, refers to agricultural systems that can be continued indefinitely without system failure.
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