ABSTRACT
On the surface, there are clear trade-offs between mining and achieving land degradation neutrality (LDN) for biodiversity conservation. Yet, when informal, poverty-driven mining livelihoods and their occurrence in nearly all terrestrial biomes and important biodiversity areas on earth is considered, trade-offs become decidedly less clear. This chapter assesses SDG 15 (life on land) and evaluates the extent to which informal miners are being ‘left behind’ in global conservation, sustainable land management, and landscape restoration, reflecting one of the most critical interfaces in mineral resource governance and society today.
Minerals and metals underpin nearly all sectors in the global economy (IRP, 2020), and their supply is critical to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and successfully implement the Paris Agreement (Ali et al., 2017). Accordingly, mineral resource governance has been placed at the leading edge of the 2030 Development Agenda, with growing consensus that mining must continue for the foreseeable future (Ali et al., 2017; IRP, 2019a; IRP, 2020). While mining into critical ecosystems raises concern, the international community must plan for the coming decades with rising demand for minerals, metals, and other common commodities (i.e., sand, clay, stone). In rural economies, continuous use of land for mining, agriculture, livestock production, and fuelwood harvest can undermine conservation, sustainable land management, and rehabilitation, especially where artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), low-tech, labor-intensive mineral processing and extraction (Hilson, 2009, p. 1) enables subsistence. This chapter considers how mining at various scales impacts the opportunities to reach SDG 15. There is a greater emphasis on ASM in the chapter since this area of activity poses the bigger challenge for land restoration strategies and governance in remote high biodiversity regions.
