Mining and Environmental Change in Sierra Leone, West Africa: A Remote Sensing and Hydrogeomorphological Study

This paper evaluates the environmental changes in southwestern Sierra Leone, West Africa from rutile (titanium dioxide) between 1967 and 1995. Mining in peripheral parts of the world economy is a consequence of larger global economic interests. Historically, long-distance trade and export production of minerals and other natural resources primarily for the benefit of core countries are responsible for transforming the natural environment and landscapes of peripheral sectors of the world economy. Tracking environmental change in developing countries such as Sierra Leone is challenging because of financial and infrastructural constraints on the use of ground methods of evaluation and monitoring. Remote sensing data are invaluable in assessing the human dimensions of Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) with implications for political ecology. Using available multi-date infrared Landsat images supplemented with field hydrological and biophysical data, we monitored the rapid temporal and spatial dynamic characteristic of mining areas in the study area with a focus on physical changes to the landscape. Reservoir construction for mining has caused flooding of alluvial lowlands, deforestation, and the creation of tailings and stockpiles over mined-out portions of the lease. Although the study was conducted at a local scale, it represents the broad, regional, past-to-present manner by which global economic interests exploit natural resources and impact the environment in distant places

Mining in Africa after the supercycle:New directions and geographies

Mining in Africa is at a pivotal moment. For most of the period 2000 to 2012, the extractive industries were in a ‘supercycle’ of sustained high commodity prices. Driven by resource-intensive growth in emerging market economies, prices were anticipated to continue for decades to come. However, this ‘supercycle’ ended in 2012 and there followed a severe slump in mineral prices from 2014 onwards. On the one hand, a new era of commodity market dynamics has begun, with changing patterns of economic activity, minerals governance, and environmental regulation. On the other hand, the end of the supercycle has continued or intensified pre-existing trends towards mechanisation, automation, and enclavity while distributive pressures on companies by local communities and host nations increases. We argue that the end of the supercycle has reconfigured the geographies of extraction in ways that are not yet reflected in existing research nor taken into consideration in policy implementation, particularly around corporate strategy, state- business relations and models for mineral-based development strategies. In this paper we map the terrain of research on the supercycle in Africa and identify emerging post-supercycle trends - some of which have overtaken research. The paper is structured around examining four themes: (1) new geographies of investment and extraction, (2) new geographies of struggle, (3) national minerals-based development and (4) labour and livelihoods, for which we identify key trends during the supercycle and post-supercycle and areas for future research and policy development

A Sustainability Index for Small Island Developing States

This paper proposes a novel approach to measuring the progress of small island developing states (SIDS) towards sustainable development (SD) as set by the UN Sustainable Development Goals 2030. Currently, these goals do not provide adequate guidance on how countries might measure their progress towards sustainability. We use these goals and a subset of their targets to develop an index with concrete targets, through the use of pertinent sustainability indicators, that SIDS should aim to achieve a sustainable society. In addition to the three categorical pillars of SD (social, economic and environmental), we included the category Climate Change and Disaster Management (incorporating Disaster Risk Reduction). The basis of our decision is that the UN and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have both recognized the vulnerability of SIDS to both environmental hazards. Our index scores a total 70 individual indicators for the four categories to track the progress of a SIDS towards a sustainable society. Using the Caribbean nation, Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, as our SIDS case study, we report the average of the scores for each category to illustrate its progress towards sustainability. Overall Trinidad and Tobago is slowly progressing towards a more sustainably developed society. Our results show that the nation is only moderately successful regarding progress in three traditional pillars of SD, social, economic and environmental. However, Trinidad and Tobago scores poorly in the Climate Change and Disaster Management category and needs to improve in this area especially due to its vulnerability