By Dr Ross Harvey, director of research and programmes at Good Governance Africa (GGA)
I had the privilege of growing up in some of the most remote places in southern Africa: mining towns. Essentially, I grew up in the bush. This early exposure to wild landscapes got me thinking about the relationship between rich ore bodies under the ground and the natural environment. The result is that I have two often parallel passions. On the one hand, I long to see the continent’s mineral wealth generate broad-based development. On the other, I want our wild landscapes preserved for future generations. Of course, mining is fundamentally unsustainable; the resource being mined is finite. Nature conservation, to the contrary, is fundamentally about long-run sustainability. How do these two worlds connect?
A growing concern is that conservation strategies in southern Africa seem to adopt an extractive attitude towards nature. In other words, because some resources in the natural environment are technically renewable, the thinking is that we can extract a certain number of them each year and still have enough the following year not have to worry about population sustainability. For example, rhino populations grow at a certain rate, all else being equal, given the right circumstances, zero poaching and so forth. To put it technically, many conservation decisions are based on a consumptive view that science can establish a maximum sustainable yield from which a management authority can determine an annual extraction quota. For instance, Botswana’s wildlife authority has deemed it fit to sell licences to hunt 400 trophy bull elephants a year. The government has not made the science behind that quota determination public, which is a serious governance issue. The other problem is that such a static view does not consider long run ecological integrity. But the rhetoric rationalising this kind of consumptive use typically argues that the revenue from trophy hunting is required for conservation. This argument is difficult to sustain, especially given that trophy hunting is a dying industry, the quality of ‘trophy animals’ is rapidly declining, and the economic and ecological opportunity costs of the practice are extensive.
I’m far more partial to moving away from consumptive use models when it comes to nature conservation. We need to find more innovative and sustainable ways of funding contiguous landscapes that avoid the current problems of fragmentation and degradation in certain wilderness areas due to a lack of funding. These innovative funding plans need to include the creation of safe migratory corridors for keystone species like elephants (and apex predators like lions) to move safely between protected areas and be buffered by conservation-friendly agriculture zones. Local communities need to have a sense of ownership of both the wildlife and the agriculture. They should enjoy the dual benefits both from their agricultural produce entering high-end tourism value chains and from self-owned non-consumptive direct tourism options.
What does all of this have to do with mining? Well, mining is extractive and wealth-generating at the same time. While in operation, mining wealth generated in a particular area can, counterintuitively, serve long-run conservation goals. Here’s an example. I travelled to Kalumbila, Zambia, in 2018 as part of a research project to examine how copper could serve as a flywheel for Zambian development. Sentinel Mine, owned and run by First Quantum Minerals (FQM), did an extraordinary thing by building a mine and a town that would be sustained well beyond the life of mine – by design! One of the management staff told me that when they arrived on the mining concession, there was an eerie silence. Even the birds had been poached – local community members had smothered the forest with v-traps placed in tree forks. Birds are a bellwether for ecological health, and they were all killed. The mine decided to turn their non-mining concession areas into a nature reserve.
With some sharp environmental foresight, they decided to redivert the river temporarily, with a view to restoring its original course post-mine. Beyond that, they’ve already built five-star tourism lodges that will sustain nature conservation after the mine has died. The concession area will then be connected to the nearest national park, which will create one of the largest contiguous conservation areas in Zambia. In the meantime, they’ve also developed a sawmill worth $2million that produces furniture. Forests are genuinely given to ‘sustainable use’, unlike slow-growing animals like elephants.
We clearly don’t need to take a ‘consumptive use’ view to generate the wealth required for conservation. Ironically, mining – if done well and with some foresight – can often serve conservation ends by establishing models that do not rely on extracting wildlife for cash. Extract the ore body under the ground and use some of that cash to build contiguous wild landscapes. Once the mine has been depleted, the area can be restored. But it really does require planning informed by a workable vision. There are too few Kalumbilas around and there’s no good reason why there shouldn’t be more.
Under some circumstances, mining can clearly serve conservation ends. Of course, mining should not occur at all in ecologically sensitive areas like the Okavango Delta in Botswana or the Nyerere National Park (formerly the Selous Game Reserve) in Tanzania. These are both World Heritage Sites and should simply be off limits. However, where possible, mine closure plans should seriously consider how mining might contribute to inclusive and sustainable conservation.
