Water International regularly publishes thematic special issues on topics proposed by others. This is the first time within memory that the topic has been selected by the journal itself, with papers submitted in response to a call for papers. Why did the journal choose ‘Mining and Water’ as the topic? At the time the call was issued, a couple of years ago, the only mining and water issue that was really grabbing attention was fracking – important, of course, but far from the whole story. Conventional mining is still there, and growing, and its interactions with water should not be forgotten, but are too often ‘out of mine, out of sight’.
In the past, the legacy issue of mining, water and other land uses was not fully appreciated. Nor were the problems of ensuring full stakeholder involvement, particularly that of local communities. Today that is no longer true. Many people inside and outside the minerals industry recognize that conventional mining does have a legacy that goes beyond the minerals and metals it has withdrawn from the earth. All too often its legacy also includes the fact that mining has irretrievably affected communities and ecosystems around the world through its impact on water. Moreover, this ‘mining–water nexus’ can be shown to have environmental, social and political dimensions. At the same time, we cannot ignore that the wealth, influence and technical knowledge of mining interests can and must be part of the solution. For that reason, the call for papers made it clear that the editors were after two sorts of studies:
Those in which mining is clearly part of a problem that needs to be highlighted and addressed
Those in which mining is clearly part of a solution that is either being developed or already exists.
Those two foci reflected recognition that the interaction between mineral extraction and water resources does indeed pose problems and, more importantly, that:
the knowledge base and implementation capacity for finding sustainable solutions to these problems must arise largely from within the mining sector itself.… Whereas the mining sector traditionally externalised their costs to the environment and society, this sector is now increasingly involved in contributing to the development of future solutions to current water constraints in their areas of operation. Finding a balance between solving mining-related societal water problems while at the same time ensuring an economically productive mining operation, is a precondition to ensuring that future mining operations will have a social licence to operate. (Emphasis added)
Those words are pretty strong stuff. If the minerals industry cannot find ways of resolving these problems, and resolving them in ways acceptable to the community, it is simply not going to be allowed to continue to operate. Such a threat would not have appeared even a dozen years ago.
One special issue could not cover all of the chains of process incorporated in the minerals industry. To create a coherent special issue, we decided to focus on mining as that term is commonly understood, which implies the use of a shovel – a hand shovel at one end of the scale and giants many storeys tall at the other – rather than wells withdrawing liquids and gases.
Even within that editorial limitation, the impact of mining is too big to ignore in a world of oversubscribed water. The water that appears in statistics on mining use is only that small share that is directly used for operations, such as to cool drills and to move material around inside the mine. But sizeable volumes of water are also required to maintain the community and the labour force it houses. And much greater volumes are affected by the very existence of the mine, whether it is on the surface, diverting rivers and draining ponds, or underground, cutting across aquifers. These often-ignored volumes of water do not appear in statistics on water use in mining, but they can be enormous, and they can make huge differences for people living and working in areas where mines coexist with earlier and typically more traditional ways of life.
It is therefore inappropriate to see the water–mining nexus as a set of technical problems that need to be solved to facilitate more efficient mining. We cannot ignore its numerous social and environmental effects that are certainly local and often regional in scale. This characteristic implies that whatever the resolution, or absence of resolution, there will be winners and losers, and, further, that the problems are typically far more political than they are technical. In this sense they are very much like large dams. All of the papers in this issue recognize, and most focus on, the political components in the issues they explore.
When not properly regulated, mining can poison politics as much as, and in association with, poisoning land and water. In most countries of the world, corporate mining bodies must go through some administrative process to get a legal status that gives them permission to operate in a certain area, and to use certain resources, notably water, for some period of time and within some restrictions. This process almost inherently creates an incentive for the executives of the mining firm to establish a friendly relationship with the relevant power structure – certainly the local power structure and not uncommonly the national power structure – including both regulators and politicians. The process is smoothed by mining areas commonly being in remote areas whose inhabitants are already marginalized legally and politically.
Sadly, the mining industry has in many cases insisted on rights that were negotiated with governments that had little or no knowledge of, or sympathy for, local people or local conditions. In the worst cases, the companies have developed their own security forces or supported national security forces, with loss of life on the part of community people or people who came to support their claims to land and water. Even where relations are ‘mutually beneficial’ economically, local people are led to abandon traditional lifestyles and workstyles that were lower-paying but sustainable, in exchange for jobs in mines that are higher-paying but more dangerous and less likely to be there over the long term.
Contributing to the wide impact of the mining–water nexus is the tendency for gold to be exploited in a rush. Though extraction of gold ore is not notably different from other forms of mining, gold deposits tend to occur as veins or pods that, given the high returns per tonne mined, can be profitably exploited by relatively short-term ventures. Worse yet, the most common form of treatment is to extract the gold from the ore by use of cyanide. Both extraction by large earth-moving equipment and leakage from cyanide-laden ponds leave lasting scars on former agricultural or grazing lands, but little or no benefit for local communities. No wonder that half of the papers in this special issue involve gold mining.
No wonder either that all of the articles in this special issue either mention the deficiencies of existing governance structures and the need for better ones, or explore the use of new techniques to identify and evaluate social and environmental impacts. In some cases the needed changes are marginal; more commonly they are substantial. Perhaps for this reason, one-third of the papers presented here focus on conditions in South Africa, a middle-income country where one expects governments to be more open to major changes in legal regimes and modern social and environmental assessment processes than elsewhere. Another third of the papers describe governance in Peru, a lower-income country that has centuries of experience with mining but has shown reluctance to review antiquated and inequitable procedures over the years. Two of the remaining papers describe conditions in Ghana and in Mexico, both lower-middle-income countries where there is relatively little recent information on either mining conditions or governance. The final paper focuses on Australia, an upper-income country that has been notably dynamic in working toward modern water policies and seems ready to do the same with the mining–water nexus.
The first four papers in this special issue emphasize problems that could arise in almost any mining district in the world: unintended consequences of policy ‘reforms’; data availability and significance; liabilities from transboundary pollution; and new tools to measure adverse impacts of mining.
Turton emphasizes that revenues from gold mining sustained the apartheid regime after 1961 in the face of economic sanctions and military spending. Among other efforts to preserve the mining industry, some water-based liabilities were nationalized. The unintended consequence was a fall in investment in the industry, which stimulated more nationalization and a further decline in investment. Only with senior-level, science-based policy reform was South Africa able to cut the Gordian Knot created by the apartheid state in its self-imposed battle for survival. Water policy thus plays a critical but often invisible role in attracting the level of investment needed to rehabilitate mine-impacted aquatic ecosystems and landscapes.
Timms et al. take on the specific problem of hydrological measurement with specific reference to groundwater withdrawals in the Hunter Valley coal fields in Australia. Improvements in water reporting have enabled mine water issues at a watershed scale to be evaluated in unprecedented detail, leading to improved security of water supplies for all water users. This paper highlights these major solutions in a region with increasing competition for water. Also, a new water use productivity curve was developed that showed that water take and use rates are unrelated to the type of mine or production rates. This suggests that water efficiency depends upon other factors, such as site-specific practices and constraints.
In 2014, the United Nations Watercourses Convention came into force. As a signatory to the convention, South Africa is subject to its provisions, including those that prescribe liabilities for transboundary pollution. Kinna asks whether acid mine drainage originating within South Africa and flowing through the Olifants/Limpopo River system into Mozambique might establish grounds for claiming liability. Whether or not such claims are actually pursued is another matter. However, Kinna concludes that the issue of liability and compensation for pollution of transboundary water resources is not going away anytime soon.
Danoucaras et al. ask how often mining-induced changes in water use and distribution turn out to be the source of social impacts. Their paper explores the Social Water Assessment Protocol (SWAP), which is a series of questions on 14 themes relating to how a community interacts with its water resources. A pilot study of the SWAP was conducted around a mining region in the Prestea-Huni Valley District in Ghana. The application showed that the SWAP has been well designed to capture the key elements of the social context of the region, and that it is an effective and systematic way to draw out the social issues of the communities that surround the mine.
The next four papers present case studies of problems in mining regions as diverse as South Africa, Peru, Ghana and Mexico. They explore a range of issues including: introducing unconventional resources in established mining districts; linkages of hydrological effects underground to social impacts on the surface; conflicts and power structures; and opportunities to bring local people into decision making.
Esterhuyse et al. review experience with unconventional oil and gas (UOG) projects around the world and consider policy requirements in South Africa, which has yet to embark on significant UOG resource development. They take a holistic view of the reciprocal and multidimensional impacts of UOG extraction, with particular attention to energy–water linkages, water–agriculture linkages and water–human population linkages. They conclude that regulators need to take cognizance of spatial and temporal issues of scale related to UOG extraction and must also address issues of scale linked to the institutional management of all the resources that may be affected during UOG extraction. As in the situation previously described by Kinna, the government has to be uncharacteristically forward-looking to avoid some very nasty, and foreseeable, situations.
Vela et al. explore linkages between hydrological effects of mining and water distribution to communities, based on a case study of the Yanacocha mining district in the Cajamarca Region of Peru. They identify important concerns over changes in water flows, falling water table levels and diminished base flows, with impacts on people living in the same water basin. The authors question whether it makes sense to assign water rights without hydrological planning of the catchment and clear knowledge of the availability of water resources.
Stoltenborg and Boelens review a dispute over land and water rights near an open-pit gold and silver mine in Cerro de San Pedro, Mexico. They find that changes in land and water rights in Cerro de San Pedro result from a complex interplay among different actors, where the court systems, officials and governments at diverse levels play a deeply troublesome role. To add to the problems, a multinational corporation used loopholes in the laws and its economic and discursive powers to serve its own interests, to the detriment of those of local communities. In addition, international agreements such as NAFTA have had a profound and unethical impact on the litigation process.
Patrick and Bharadwaj start from the position that uncertainty over impacts on water quality from large-scale (formal) mining activity has raised human health concerns among campesino (peasant) communities in the Ancash Region of the Peruvian Andes. They explore how integrated water resources management (IWRM) might influence the outcome of industrial mining activities. Unfortunately IWRM is not practised in Ancash, to the detriment of the natural environment and highland campesino communities. Mobilizing IWRM at the national level and scaling IWRM implementation down to the regional and local levels would, in their view, empower campesinos to join in water resources decision making.
Finally, in a uniquely important perspective, Sosa and Zwarteveen look back at case studies of purported reforms in water governance in the mining industry of Peru and ask whether they are really improving governance or just neutralizing conflicts. They find that almost all the conflicts are between multinational mining companies and local communities over the access to, control of and distribution of water. Based on their research, they show that, although legal and technical conflict resolution strategies are effective in temporarily diffusing tensions, they do not address the underlying political causes of conflicts. Instead, solving environmental conflicts around large-scale mining operations requires explicitly admitting and dealing with the fact that these conflicts are always inherently political, situated, complex and power-laden.
Given the strong emphasis on the need for reforms in governance, the identification of pitfalls in even ‘enlightened’ governance reforms in the past, and the number of papers that found a balance of power that was heavily weighted against local people, attention to the reforms advocated in this special issue is not just academically advisable; it is politically essential.
For far too long, the dominant paradigm in mining has been based on legal compliance only. This could be seen as the legal license to mine, which typically involves little more than minimum compliance levels. This is no longer adequate. Growing recognition of the environmental and social externalities of mining, mediated by water, requires compliance with what could be called the social licence to mine. Governments and mining companies violate this licence at their peril. This special issue of Water International contains nine examples showing why operating within the social license to mine is a necessary condition for sustainability in mining.