Discussion #1 - Question #1
Discussion details
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Question 1. Impacts environnementaux associés aux Minéraux du Développement.
A partir de vos expériences personnelles, des connaissances acquises durant les ateliers de formations et du contexte de votre pays,
- Quelles ont été les pratiques et les approches les plus efficaces utilisées pour minimiser et / ou éliminer les impacts environnementaux associés à la production, la transformation et la fermeture / réadaptation des mines ou carrières des Minéraux du Développement ?
- Quelles mesures politiques et règlementations gouvernementales sont en place pour minimiser les impacts environnementaux associés aux Minéraux du Développement ?
Documents additionnels ci-dessous.
Résumé de la discussion
Cher(e)s participant(e)s,
Tout d’abord, nous vous remercions pour votre participation et les riches informations que vous avez partagées lors de la première question de notre première discussion sur Capacity4dev !
Le thème de la semaine dernière était « Les impacts Environnementaux associes aux Minéraux du Développement. »
Plusieurs points clés ont été mis en avant. Ce document est un récapitulatif des questions abordées et de vos propositions de mesures politiques et pratiques pour une meilleure gestion des impacts environnementaux associés à la production, au traitement et à la fermeture de mines / carrières des Minéraux de Développement.
Les principales questions abordées étaient :
- L’absence d’activité de réhabilitation ou de fermeture des sites miniers une fois l’exploitation minière terminée.
- Les défis liés au suivi des activités minières à petite échelle illégale.
Réhabilitation des sites miniers
Comme la plupart d'entre vous l'ont souligné, les sites miniers et les carrières sont souvent abandonnés lorsque l'activité minière est terminée. Afin de mieux gérer ces fermetures/réhabilitations de sites, voici les propositions que vous avez mis en avant :
- Renforcer les capacités au niveau institutionnel et individuel grâce à la mise en place de formations de sensibilisation structurée adaptées à un large éventail de parties prenantes afin de sensibiliser tous les acteurs impliqués dans la chaîne de valeur des Minéraux du Développement. Cela est particulièrement nécessaire pour les mineurs artisanaux et à petite échelle (ASM), qui n'ont peut-être pas accès aux connaissances et aux ressources nécessaires pour assurer une fermeture durable des mines ;
- Effectuer des formations de fermeture et de réhabilitation adaptées aux besoins des travailleurs de l'ASM, visant à transformer les terrains des carrières/mines en terres économiquement productives. Ces formations mettraient l'accent sur la transformation des mines fermées en d'autres sources de revenus économiquement viables, d'approvisionnement alimentaire et/ou de création d'emplois. Par exemple, des anciennes mines et carrières dans le nord-ouest du Cameroun ont été transformées en terres agricoles ou en piscicultures).
- Etablir et opérationnaliser un budget pour la réhabilitation des mines par les gouvernements centraux, via les ministères sectoriels afin d’apporter des financements pour des clôture et réhabilitations durables de mines.
Formalisation des mineurs artisanaux et à petite échelle
Le second défi important qui a été mentionné était la difficulté de gérer une grande partie de l’activité minière artisanale et à petite échelle en raison du caractère clandestin qui prévaut dans ce secteur. Par conséquent, les régulations en matière d’Environnement, de Santé et de Sécurité ne sont ni respectées ni même connues dans bien des cas.
Les solutions proposées incluent :
- Mobiliser et encourager les mineurs à s’organiser en groupes ou associations. En rejoignant un groupement, les mineurs artisanaux et à petite échelle obtiennent un meilleur accès aux informations sur la formalisation de leurs activités, les marchés et les opportunités de formation sur les réglementations environnementales, santé et sécurité.
- Décentraliser les obtentions de permis et processus d’enregistrement des mineurs artisanaux et à petite échelle, ainsi qu’apporter des provisions de services en ligne pour permettre des permis et enregistrements plus rapides et accessibles.
Nous aimerions vous remercier une nouvelle fois pour votre participation à cette discussion. N’oubliez pas que les documents de cette première question sont disponibles pour téléchargement ci-dessous.
La discussion pour la Question 2 sur la Santé et la Sécurité au Travail reste en ligne jusqu’au dimanche 13 août inclus. Nous sommes impatients de lire vos contributions !
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Question 1. Environmental impacts associated with Development Minerals.
From your own country context, your experience and from the training workshop’s knowledge sharing,
- What have you found to be the most effective practices and approaches used to minimize and/or eliminate the environmental impacts associated with the production, processing and mine/quarry closure of Development Minerals?
- Which government policies and regulations are in place to minimize the environmental impacts associated with Development Minerals?
Reading resources below.
Discussion Sum up
Dear Participants,
First of all, thank you for your participation and the great insights you shared related to the first question of our first discussion on Capacity4dev!
Last week’s question was on the “Environmental impacts associated with Development Minerals”.
Several key observations were raised. This is a recap of the issues raised and your proposals for policies and practices for better management of Environmental impacts associated with the production, processing and mine/quarry closure of Development Minerals.
The main issues raised were:
- The absence of mining site rehabilitation or closure activities when the mining has been completed,
- The challenges associated with monitoring of unlicensed Small-scale mining activity,
Site rehabilitation
As most of you have pointed out, mine sites and quarries are often abandoned when the mining activity is completed. In order to manage these site closures & rehabilitations, these are the proposals you have put forth:
- Capacity building at institutional and individual levels through the implementation of structured sensitization trainings tailored to a wide range of stakeholders in order to raise the awareness of all the actors involved in the Development Minerals value chain. This is particularly required for the artisanal and small-scale miners (ASM), who may not have access to the knowledge and resources to undertake sustainable mine closure;
- Undertake mine-closure and rehabilitation trainings tailored to the needs of the ASM workers, aimed at transforming the quarry/mine wastelands into economically productive lands. These trainings would emphasize on the transformation of closed mines into other economically viable sources of income, food supply and/or job creation. For instance, mine/quarry wastelands in North West Cameroon have been transformed into agricultural lands, or fish ponds).
- Establish and operationalize a mining rehabilitation budget by central governments, through the line ministries in order to provide finances for sustainable mine closure and rehabilitation.
Formalization of ASM Miners
The second important challenge raised was the difficulty in monitoring a large part of the ASM activity because it is mostly unlicensed. As a result of this, Environmental, Health and Safety regulations are neither respected, nor known in many cases. The proposed solutions include:
- Mobilizing and encourage miners to organize themselves into groups or associations. By joining such clusters/groupings, ASM have better access to information on formalization; markets, and trainings opportunities on Environmental regulations and Health and Safety Regulations.
- Decentralizing the licensing and registration processes for ASM, as well as the provision of e-online services to make licensing and registration faster and more accessible.
We would like to thank you once again for your participation in this discussion. Please note that all the documents of Question 1 are available for download below.
The discussion for Question 2 on Occupational Health and Safety remains online until Sunday 13 August included. We look forward to your inputs!
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Salut à tous !
Chez nous la question se trouve au niveau de la réhabilitation des anciens sites et de l'arrêt des activités sur les sites non autorisés. Car il existe des sites autorités où l'on oriente tout demandeur de permis d'exploitation de mines à petite échelle.
Le défi est donc de trouver des moyens par l'État pour réhabiliter les sites par la suite. Mais cela peut se résoudre dans l'encadrement des exploitants, car l'on peut instituer un prélèvement de fonds à cet effet au exploitants, et engager une structure pour réhabiliter.
Pour ce qui est de la sécurité, des règles sont fixées et suivies par les encadreurs. Et cela réduit les risques au niveau de la santé, pour les sites autorisés.
Dans les carrières, les risques sont beaucoup plus réduits, côté environnement et réhabilitation. Mais des règles de réhabilitation existent. D'où la possibilité d'octroyer des sites un peu partout. Le défi reste au niveau des conditions de travail pour les petits exploitants.
Toutefois le gros soucis reste la corruption, qui emmène parfois au non respect des regles et au manque de sanctions réelles.
Dear fellow alumni, it's in deed a pleasure to share with you guys across the globe.
Considering the fact that community, health and safety is the prominent factor to consider in setting up any mining enterprise in regard to development minerals, we have to lay more emphasis on the measures to be taken during the various mining phases. miners operate under a common mining code but with different organizational strategies and setup mechanisms varying from one enterprise or mining group to another.
I will be briefing my fellow alumni base on the practices i think should be put in place to ensure sustainability in each an every mine.
1. Proper education of all the artisanal miners who may not have access to special trainings being rendered by industrial mining companies to her staff on environmental, community, health and safety on not only construction but in all fields of development minerals .
2. Special training should also be given to miners on rehabilitation of mine and mining closure. In some areas where artisanal mining is being practiced like the case of Mbiame, North West region Cameroon, some of the pits where sapphire and olivine have been extracted have been used for a different economic activit., that's for the creation of fish ponds. Some of you may ask how has turning a mining pit into a fish pond contributed to environment, community, health and safety?
a) an area have been fenced for to ensure safety
b) fish is a source of food rich in protein, fats and oil which through it consumption results to good health
c) last but not the least, it led to the futher creation many fishing jobs for youth and women.
3. Miners should be organized in groups and get them registered, after this, we should in collaboration with them help to set up rules and regulations governing the said mining group(s) inorder to ensure that environment, community, health and safety is of great priority to them.
4. We should also in collaboration with artisanal miners representatives visit some selected mining operation site to share with them the good mining practices such as the use of PPE, rehabilitation after every mined and mining closure mechanisms.
5. Talking about the least cost operation which I think is the last part of the question, inorder to realize the effective implementation of this aspect of environment, community,health and safety, we should in collaboration with the artisanal miners representatives, oraganised a workshop to :-
a. set up modalities
b. select some artisanal miners or youths and women with some knowledge and or expertise in managing people and equipped them to work directly under the supervision of ACP-EU development minerals program of UNDP.
c. there should be a compurized register for all artisanal miners.
d. To avoid issues related to favouritism and curroption. It will be good that all the mining permits be applied online before the deposition of any hand copy.
To conclude, if this approach is considered, it will be easy to know how miners/ mining group(s) to work with and hence it will enable us as ASM trainers to know how many trainings we can organise per season and will ease budgeting.
What is known is that before all the activities that relate to mining begin, they have to be approved by the agency responsible for coordinating sustainable development that is National Environment Management Authority (NEMA). NEMA enlists conditions for mining projects and closure programs to follow. This was found to be effective in its approaches towards management of environment impacts. The most effective practices and approaches in minimization and or elimination of environmental impacts associated with production, processing and mine/quarry closure of Development Minerals are commonly embedded in the environment social management plan commonly known as ESMP in Uganda. This is a tool that sets efficiency in which it is built in the Environmental and Social Management Impact Assessment (ESIA) report. The tool provides basic approaches and guidance on responding and addressing environment impacts in case they occur during closure programmes of development minerals such as quarries. A decommissioning impact analysis section in the ESIA is mandatory which exhibits appropriate ways to minimize impacts. This has been found across all the sites that are being operated. A few quarry sites have been closed down, though to date there is no full restoration. Nevertheless no any incidence has been reported. However it is important to note that there are small scale mines that do not have effective practices in place hence leading to incidences. The operators were observed in full fear of routine monitoring of NEMA. In other case the mandatory annual environmental audit (EA) towards assessing the performance and compliance of the operators is an effective practices whence they fear eventuating penalties. The closure programmes base on this practice in order to achieve the practice efficiency. Nevertheless, there has not been many closed mining projects in these areas except the quarry sites used during the road constructions.
Uganda sveral polices that in one way or the other supliment to each other a few a listed below:
Policies
Mining and Mineral Policy (draft)
The National Environment Management Policy
The National Water Policy of 1999
Constitution of Republic of Uganda, 1995 and subsequent Acts that include
National Environmental Act,
Land Act,
Land Acquisition Act, 1965
Water Act, Cap 152
Mining Act, 9/2003
The Occupational Safety and Health Act, 2006
Physical Planners Act 2010
The Public Health Act, cap 281
Regulations
Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations, 1998
The National Environment (Waste Management) Regulations 1999
National Environment (Noise Standards and Control) Regulations, 2003
Water Resources Regulations, 1998
The National Environment (Audit) Regulations 2006
Discussion-Question #1
Thé effective practices andapproaches to minimise environmental impacts on production, processing and quarry closure.
In Cameroon it requires an elaborated environmental management plan and thé mitigation measures to beimplemented and a proper waste management plan before thé authorities issues a mining permit. Thé usual approach for thé management of waste is to contain and collect them at thé point of production treat thé waste to make them environmentally safe, and dispose of them to thé land, water and air. Thé method used at a particular mine dépends mainly on an évaluation of cost, environmental performance and risk of failure. Selecting appropriate waste storage locations, and proper material characterization, including thé prédiction of long term chemical behavior.
=Permits are issued on shutdowns to cover mine closure, and site cleanup. Mine closure activities often involved containing and covering tailings to prevent their escape into thé environment, minimizing thé amount of water seeping from tailings into surface of ground water, covering waste rock piles and exposed matériels with top soils and planting végétation to prevent érosion, and designing thé final land formation to minimise érosion and post closure maintenance.
= ln most cases rehabilitating thé lits left behind is thé biggest challenge because of thé lack of monitoring and it is been donne by dumping waste and garbage or hazardous waste and thé réhabilitation process takes a longer périod.
= whereas thé artisanal and small scale mining is been undertaken clandestinely. There is total disregard of health and safety practices. It is common to find abandoned quarries in communities. Therefore very difficultés to monitor and control them, since they are illégal. They are always involved in fatal accidents like drowning, collapse of quarry walls, landslides, suffocation in rivers and fire disasters.
As a Sworn Inspector of mines, l suggest that, mining activities should be legalized at all levels because it is a source of livelihood and creates employment to thé local communities. It would be beneficial to build thé capacities of miners with thé training acquired from ACP Development Minerals on health, safety and sécurity as well as environmental conservation, and encouragé them to organized legalized groups or coopératives to control their activities for sustainability to increase their income to reduce rural Exodus.
A good write-up mbu. I propose that the Cameroon government should introduce online licinesing application and online licinesing in order to eliminate favouritism and curroption at the level of obtaining any mining permit. If this is put in place, it will gradually eradicate illegal mining and hence ease environmental impact assessment as the miners will be made known from the number of permits issued and numbers of mining sites
Il n'existe aucun favoritisme lors de l'attribution des permits aux artisans. Rappelons nous que l'ancien code minier ne prenait pas en compte l'exploitation semi mécanisée et pourtant cela se pratiquait sur le terrain par ce que les citoyens camerounais (qui étaient les seuls à qui le gouvernement donnait des permis) les vendaient en retour aux expatriés qui exploitent avec des engins. Je ne pense pas qu'il y ait favoritisme à ce niveau.
Concernant le problème de réhabilitation des sites abandonnés je pense que le gouvernement doit trouver des partenaires privés ou mettre en place un budget spécial afin de non seulement clôturer les puits mais aussi les valoriser pour l'agriculture, l'élevage, la pêche ou même le tourisme.
Bonjour Marie Astride,
Je suis d'accord avec vous sur le besoin d'allouer des budgets publics à la réhabilitation des sites lors de la fermeture des mines. Savez-vous si certains pays et/ou le votre ont déjà mis en place ce genre de fonds ? A ma connaissance, je ne crois pas que cela existe. Auquel cas, l'idée mérite d'être creusée par nos collègues / alumni des Minéraux du Développement issus des gouvernements dans les pays ACP. Je crois qu'en outre, cette initiative bénéficierait d'un soutien technique (et peut-être financier) certain de la part des bailleurs nationaux, régionaux et internationaux.
Merci pour votre expertise et réponse,
David
Bonjour David, je ne connais aucun pays d'Afrique qui ait fait cela mais j'ai récemment suivi une formation en Australie et le gouvernement s'est engagé pour réhabiliter les sites, une partie de leur fonds vient des redevances que les grandes industries minières paient à l'Etat.
Très intéressant ! Vous auriez de la documentation (sites internet / documents) à me transférer svp ? Si vous avez des fichiers, vous pouvez envoyer le mail à development.minerals@undp.org
Excellent points you have raised Joan.
To fellow alumni, who are either in associations/cooperatives or work with associations/cooperatives,
What is your experience in terms of improved health and safety practices/standards once a group has been mobilised or formed?
Which measures/practices have you seen and used, that have contributed to improved health and safety practices?