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ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Mining extracts useful materials from the earth. Although mining provides many valuable minerals, it can also harm people and the environment.

Anthropology, Archaeology, Earth Science, Geology

Open-Pit Copper Mine

Throughout history, minerals, like copper, have been extracted from the earth for human use. It is still mined in places like this open-pit mine outside of Silver City, New Mexico, in the United States.

Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Mining is the process of extracting useful materials from the earth. Some examples of substances that are mined include coal, gold, or iron ore . Iron ore is the material from which the metal iron is produced.

The process of mining dates back to prehistoric times. Prehistoric people first mined flint, which was ideal for tools and weapons since it breaks into shards with sharp edges. The mining of gold and copper also dates back to prehistoric times.

These profitable substances that are mined from the earth are called minerals . A mineral is typically an inorganic substance that has a specific chemical composition and crystal structure. The minerals are valuable in their pure form, but in the earth they are mixed with other, unwanted rocks and minerals . This mix of rock and minerals is usually carried away from the mine together, then later processed and refined to isolate the desired mineral .

The two major categories of modern mining include surface mining and underground mining. In surface mining, the ground is blasted so that ores near Earth’s surface can be removed and carried to refineries to extract the minerals. Surface mining can be destructive to the surrounding landscape, leaving huge open pits behind. In underground mining, ores are removed from deep within the earth. Miners blast tunnels into the rock to reach the ore deposits. This process can lead to accidents that trap miners underground.

Along with accidents, a career in mining can also be dangerous since it can lead to health problems. Breathing in dust particles produced by mining can lead to lung disease. One of the most common forms is black lung disease, which is caused when coal miners breathe in coal dust. Many other types of mining produce silica dust, which causes a disease similar to black lung disease. These are incurable diseases that cause breathing impairment and can be fatal.

The mining process can also harm the environment in other ways. Mining creates a type of water pollution known as acid mine drainage . First, mining exposes sulfides in the soil. When the rainwater or streams dissolves the sulfides, they form acids . This acidic water damages aquatic plants and animals. Along with acid mine drainage , the disposal of mine waste can also cause severe water pollution from toxic metals. The toxic metals commonly found in mine waste, such as arsenic and mercury, are harmful to the health of people and wildlife if they are released into nearby streams.

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Related Resources

• Systematic Map Protocol
• Open access
• Published: 21 February 2019

Evidence of the impacts of metal mining and the effectiveness of mining mitigation measures on social–ecological systems in Arctic and boreal regions: a systematic map protocol

• Neal R. Haddaway   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3902-2234 1 , 2 ,
• Steven J. Cooke 3 ,
• Pamela Lesser 4 ,
• Biljana Macura 1 ,
• Annika E. Nilsson 1 ,
• Jessica J. Taylor 3 &
• Kaisa Raito 5  

Environmental Evidence volume  8 , Article number:  9 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

414k Accesses

47 Citations

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Metrics details

A Systematic Map to this article was published on 08 September 2022

Mining activities, including prospecting, exploration, construction, operation, maintenance, expansion, abandonment, decommissioning and repurposing of a mine can impact social and environmental systems in a range of positive and negative, and direct and indirect ways. Mining can yield a range of benefits to societies, but it may also cause conflict, not least in relation to above-ground and sub-surface land use. Similarly, mining can alter environments, but remediation and mitigation can restore systems. Boreal and Arctic regions are sensitive to impacts from development, both on social and environmental systems. Native ecosystems and aboriginal human communities are typically affected by multiple stressors, including climate change and pollution, for example.

We will search a suite of bibliographic databases, online search engines and organisational websites for relevant research literature using a tested search strategy. We will also make a call for evidence to stakeholders that have been identified in the wider 3MK project ( https://osf.io/cvh3u/ ). We will screen identified and retrieved articles at two distinct stages (title and abstract, and full text) according to a predetermined set of inclusion criteria, with consistency checks at each level to ensure criteria can be made operational. We will then extract detailed information relating to causal linkages between actions or impacts and measured outcomes, along with descriptive information about the articles and studies and enter data into an interactive systematic map database. We will visualise this database on an Evidence Atlas (an interactive, cartographic map) and identify knowledge gaps and clusters using Heat Maps (cross-tabulations of important variables, such as mineral type and studied impacts). We will identify good research practices that may support researchers in selecting the best study designs where these are clear in the evidence base.

On the impacts of mining

Mining activities, including prospecting, exploration, construction, operation, maintenance, expansion, abandonment, decommissioning and repurposing of a mine can impact social and environmental systems in a range of positive and negative, and direct and indirect ways. Mine exploration, construction, operation, and maintenance may result in land-use change, and may have associated negative impacts on environments, including deforestation, erosion, contamination and alteration of soil profiles, contamination of local streams and wetlands, and an increase in noise level, dust and emissions (e.g. [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ]). Mine abandonment, decommissioning and repurposing may also result in similar significant environmental impacts, such as soil and water contamination [ 6 , 7 , 8 ]. Beyond the mines themselves, infrastructure built to support mining activities, such as roads, ports, railway tracks, and power lines, can affect migratory routes of animals and increase habitat fragmentation [ 9 , 10 ].

Mining can also have positive and negative impacts on humans and societies. Negative impacts include those on human health (e.g. [ 11 ]) and living standards [ 12 ], for example. Mining is also known to affect traditional practices of Indigenous peoples living in nearby communities [ 13 ], and conflicts in land use are also often present, as are other social impacts including those related to public health and human wellbeing (e.g. [ 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ]. In terms of positive impacts, mining is often a source of local employment and may contribute to local and regional economies [ 18 , 19 ]. Remediation of the potential environmental impacts, for example through water treatment and ecological restoration, can have positive net effects on environmental systems [ 20 ]. Mine abandonment, decommissioning and repurposing can also have both positive and negative social impacts. Examples of negative impacts include loss of jobs and local identities [ 21 ], while positive impact can include opportunities for new economic activities [ 22 ], e.g. in the repurposing of mines to become tourist attractions.

Mitigation measures

‘Mitigation measures’ (as described in the impact assessment literature) are implemented to avoid, eliminate, reduce, control or compensate for negative impacts and ameliorate impacted systems [ 23 ]. Such measures must be considered and outlined in environmental and social impact assessments (EIAs and SIAs) that are conducted prior to major activities such as resource extraction [ 24 , 25 ]. Mitigation of negative environmental impacts in one system (e.g. water or soil) can influence other systems such as wellbeing of local communities and biodiversity in a positive or negative manner [ 23 ]. A wide range of technological engineering solutions have been implemented to treat contaminated waters (e.g. constructed wetlands [ 26 ], reactive barriers treating groundwater [ 27 ], conventional wastewater treatment plants). Phytoremediation of contaminated land is also an area of active research [ 28 ].

Mitigation measures designed to alleviate the negative impacts of mining on social and environmental systems may not always be effective, particularly in the long-term and across systems, e.g. a mitigation designed to affect an environmental change may have knock on changes in a social system. Indeed, the measures may have unintentional adverse impacts on environments and societies. To date, little research appears to have been conducted into mitigation measure effectiveness, and we were unable to find any synthesis or overview of the systems-level effectiveness of metal mining mitigation measures.

Mining in the Arctic

Boreal and Arctic regions are sensitive to impacts from mining and mining-related activities [ 29 , 30 ], both on social and environmental systems: these northern latitudes are often considered harsh and thus challenging for human activities and industrial development. However, the Arctic is home to substantial mineral resources [ 31 , 32 ] and has been in focus for mining activities for several 100 years, with a marked increase in the early 20th century and intensifying interest in exploration and exploitation in recent years to meet a growing global demand for metals (Fig. 1 ). Given the region’s geological features and society’s need for metals, resource extraction is likely to dominate discourse on development of northern latitudes in the near future. As of 2015, there were some 373 mineral mines across Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, The Faroes, Norway (including Svalbard), Sweden, Finland and Russia (see Table  1 ), with the top five minerals being gold, iron, copper, nickel and zinc [ 33 ].

Map of mines in the Arctic region active as of 2011

Many topics relating to mining and its impacts on environmental and social systems are underrepresented in the literature as illustrated by the following example. The Sami people are a group of traditional people inhabiting a region spanning northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Sami people are affected by a range of external pressures, one of which pertains to resource extraction and land rights, particularly in relation to nomadic reindeer herding. However, there is almost no published research on the topic [ 34 ].

The literature on the environmental and social impacts of mining has grown in recent years, but despite its clear importance, there has been little synthesis of research knowledge pertaining to the social and environmental impacts of metal mining in Arctic and boreal regions. The absence of a consolidated knowledge base on the impacts of mining and the effectiveness of mitigation measures in Arctic and boreal regions is a significant knowledge gap in the face of the continued promotion of extractive industries. There is thus an urgent need for approaches that can transparently and legitimately gather research evidence on the potential environmental and social impacts of mining and the impacts of associated mitigation measures in a rigorous manner.

Stakeholder engagement

This systematic map forms a key task within a broader knowledge synthesis project called 3MK (Mapping the impacts of Mining using Multiple Knowledges, https://osf.io/cvh3u/ ). The stakeholder group for this map includes representatives of organisations affected by the broader 3MK project knowledge mapping project or who have special interests in the project outcome. We define stakeholders here as all individuals or organisations that might be affected by the systematic map work or its findings [ 35 , 36 ], and thus broadly includes researchers and the Working and Advisory Group for this project.

Invitations to be included in this group were based on an initial stakeholder mapping process and soliciting expressions of interest (see Stakeholder Engagement Methodology Document, https://osf.io/cvh3u/ ). This group included government ministries and agencies such as the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation, the Mineral Inspectorate (Bergstaten) and County Administrative Boards, the mining industries’ branch organisation (Svemin) and individual companies such as LKAB Minerals and Boliden AB, Sami organisations, including the Sami Parliament, related research projects, and representatives of international assessment processes, such as activities within the Arctic Council. Stakeholders were invited to a specific meeting (held at Stockholm Environment Institute in September 2018) to help refine the scope, define the key elements of the review question, finalise a search strategy, and suggest sources of evidence, and also to subsequently provide comments on the structure of the protocol .

Objective of the review

The broader 3MK project aims to develop a multiple evidence base methodology [ 37 ] combining systematic review approaches with documentation of Indigenous and local knowledge and to apply this approach in a study of the impacts of metal mining and impacts of mitigation measures. This systematic map aims to answer the question:

What research evidence exists on the impacts of metal mining and its mitigation measures on social and environmental systems in Arctic and boreal regions?

The review question has the following key elements:

Social, technological (i.e. industrial contexts, heavily altered environments, etc.) and environmental systems in circumpolar Arctic and boreal regions.

Impacts (direct and indirect, positive and negative) associated with metal mining (for gold, iron, copper, nickel, zinc, silver, molybdenum and lead) or its mitigation measures. We focus on these metals as they represent approximately 88% of Arctic and boreal mines (according to relevant country operating mine data from 2015, [ 33 ]), and contains the top 5 minerals extracted in the region (gold, iron, copper, nickel and zinc). Furthermore, these minerals include all metals mined within Sweden, the scope of a related workstream within the broader 3MK project ( https://osf.io/cvh3u/ ).

For quantitative research; the absence of metal mining or metal mining mitigation measures—either prior to an activity or in an independent, controlled location lacking such impacts. Additionally, alternative mining systems is a suitable comparator. For qualitative research; comparators are typically implicit, if present and will thus not be required.

Any and all outcomes observed in social and environmental systems described in the literature will be iteratively identified and catalogued.

Both quantitative and qualitative research will be included.

The review will follow the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence Guidelines and Standards for Evidence Synthesis in Environmental Management [ 38 ] and it conforms to ROSES reporting standards [ 39 ] (see Additional file 1 ).

Searching for articles

Bibliographic database searches.

We will search bibliographic databases using a tested search string adapted to each database according to the necessary input syntax of each resource. The Boolean version of the search string that will be used in Web of Science Core Collections can be found in Additional file 2 .

We will search across 17 bibliographic databases as show in Table  2 . Bibliographic database searches will be performed in English only, since these databases catalogue research using English titles and abstracts.

Web-based search engines

Searches for academic (i.e. file-drawer) and organisational grey literature (as defined by [ 40 ]) will be performed in Google Scholar, which has been shown to be effective in retrieving these types of grey literature [ 41 ]. The search strings used to search for literature in Google Scholar are described in detail in Additional file 3 .

Search results will be exported from Google Scholar using Publish or Perish [ 42 ], which allows the first 1000 results to be exported. These records will be added to the bibliographic database search results prior to duplicate removal.

Organisational websites

In order to identify organisational grey literature, we will search for relevant evidence across the suite of organisational websites listed in Table  3 . For each website, we will save the first 100 search results from each search string as PDF/HTML files and screening the results in situ, recording all relevant full texts for inclusion in the systematic map database. The search terms used will be based on the same terms used in the Google Scholar searches described above but will be adapted iteratively for each website depending on the relevance of the results obtained. In addition, we will hand search each website to locate and screen any articles found in publications or bibliography sections of the sites. All search activities will be recorded and described in the systematic map report.

Bibliographic searches

Relevant reviews that are identified during screening will be reserved for assessment of potentially missed records. Once screening is complete (see below), we will screen the reference lists of these reviews and include relevant full texts in the systematic map database. We will also retain these relevant reviews in an additional systematic map database of review articles.

Estimating the comprehensiveness of the search

A set of 41 studies known to be relevant have been provided by the Advisory Team and Working Group (review team); the benchmark list (see Additional file 4 ). During scoping and development of the search string, the bibliographic database search results will be checked to ascertain whether any of these studies were not found. For any cases where articles on the benchmark list are missed by the draft search string, we will examine why these studies may have been missed and adapt the search string accordingly.

Search update

We will perform a search update immediately prior to completion of the systematic map database (i.e. once coding and meta-data is completed). The search strategy for bibliographic databases will be repeated using the same search string, restricting searches to the time period after the original searches were performed. New search results will be processed in the same way as original search results.

Assembling a library of search results

Following searching, we will combine results in a review management platform (e.g. EPPI-Reviewer) and duplicates will be removed using a combination of automated removal and manual screening.

Article screening and study eligibility criteria

Screening process.

We will screen records at three levels: title, abstract and full text. Screening will be performed using a review management platform (e.g. Rayyan, EPPI Reviewer, Colandr).

Consistency checking

A subset of 10% of all titles and abstracts will be screened by two reviewers, with all disagreements discussed in detail. Refinements of the inclusion criteria will be made in liaison with the entire review team where necessary. A kappa test will be performed on the outputs of screening of this subset and where agreement is below k = 0.6, a further 10% of records will be screened and tested. Only when a kappa score of greater than 0.6 is obtained will a single reviewer screen the remaining records. Consistency checking on a subset of 10% will be undertaken at full text screening in a similar manner, followed by discussion of all disagreements. A kappa test will be performed and consistency checking repeated on a second subset of 10% where agreements is below k = 0.6. Consistency checking will be repeated until a score of greater than 0.6 is obtained.

Eligibility criteria

The following inclusion criteria will be used to assess relevance of studies identified through searching. All inclusion criteria will be used at full text screening, but we believe that data type and comparator are unlikely to be useful at title and abstract screening, since this information is often not well-reported in titles or abstracts.

We will include social, technological and environmental systems in Arctic and boreal regions based on political boundaries as follows (this encompasses various definitions of boreal zones, rather than any one specific definition for comprehensiveness and ease of understanding): Canada, USA (Alaska), Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway (including Svalbard), Sweden, Finland, and Russia.

We will include all impacts (positive, negative, direct and indirect) associated with any aspect of metal mining and its mitigation measures. We will include research pertaining to all stages of mining, from prospecting onwards as follows: prospecting, exploration, construction, operation, maintenance, expansion, abandonment, decommissioning, reopening and repurposing. Eligible mines will include those of gold, iron, copper, nickel, zinc, silver, molybdenum and lead.

For quantitative research; the absence of metal mining or metal mining mitigation measures—either prior to an activity or in an independent, controlled location lacking such impacts. For qualitative research; comparators are typically implicit, if present and will thus not be required.

Any and all outcomes (i.e. measured impacts) observed in social, technological and environmental systems will be included.

We will include both quantitative and qualitative research.

We will include both primary empirical research and secondary research (reviews will be catalogued in a separate database). Modelling studies and commentaries will not be included.

For all articles excluded at title and abstract or full text levels, reasons for exclusion will be provided in the form of one or more a priori exclusion criteria as follows:

Exclude, not Arctic or boreal (population).

Exclude, no primary data (i.e. commentary, modelling article or similar) (study type).

Exclude, no comparator [for quantitative studies only].

Exclude, not mining or mining mitigation measures (intervention/exposure).

Exclude, not relevant metal mining (intervention/exposure) [this category is related to the above intervention/exposure exclusion criteria but will only be selected where all other criteria are met, facilitating expansion of the map in the future].

Exclude, not an existing mine (planned or unrealised mining activity).

Full text retrieval

We will attempt to retrieve full texts of relevant abstracts using Stockholm University and Carleton University library subscriptions. Where full texts cannot be readily retrieved this way (or via associated library inter-loan networks), we will make use of institutional access provided to our Advisory Team members, including: University College London, KTH, University of Lapland, and SLU. Where records still cannot be obtained, requests for articles will be sent to corresponding authors where email addresses are provided and/or requests for full texts will be made through ResearchGate.

Study validity assessment

This systematic map will not involve an assessment of study validity (an optional part of systematic maps), although some extracted meta-data and coding will relate to internal validity.

Demonstrating procedural objectivity

None of the review team has authored or worked on research within this field prior to starting this project, but members of the Advisory Team and project Working Group will be prevented from providing advice or comments relating specifically to research papers to which they may have contributed.

Data coding strategy

We will extract and code a range of variables, outlined in Table  4 . All meta-data and coding will be included in a detailed systematic map database, with each line representing one study-location (i.e. each independent study conducted in each independent location).

Meta-data extraction and coding will be performed by multiple reviewers following consistency checking on an initial coding of subset of between 10 and 15 full texts, discussing all disagreements. The remaining full texts will then be coded. If resources allow we may contact authors by email with requests for missing information.

Study mapping and presentation

We will display the results of the systematic mapping using a ROSES flow diagram [ 44 ]. We will narratively synthesise the relevant evidence base in our systematic map using descriptive plots and tables showing the number of studies identified across the variables described above. For more complex data, we will use heat maps to display the volume of evidence across multiple variables (see “ Knowledge gap and cluster identification strategy ”, below).

We will display the contents of our systematic map database in an Evidence Atlas; an interactive, web-based geographical information system showing all meta-data and coding on a cartographic map.

Knowledge gap and cluster identification strategy

We will use interactive heat maps (pivot charts) to display the volume of evidence across multiple dimensions of meta-data in order to identify knowledge gaps (sub-topics un- or under-represented by evidence) and knowledge clusters (sub-topics with sufficient evidence to allow full synthesis). Examples of meta-data variables that will be used together include (this is an indicative rather than exhaustive list):

Study location (country or broad region) versus outcome.

Study location (country or broad region) versus mine type.

Study location (country or broad region) versus data/study type.

Outcome versus mine type.

Outcome versus data/study type.

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Authors’ contributions

NRH drafted the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Acknowledgements

We thank the project Advisory Team for comments on the project and the draft: the team consisted of Dag Avango, Steven Cooke, Sif Johansson, Rebecca Lawrence, Pamela Lesser, Björn Öhlander, Kaisa Raito, Rebecca Rees, and Maria Tengö. We also thank the 3MK stakeholder group for valuable input. We also thank Mistra EviEM for co-funding the first Advisory Group meeting and publication fees for the systematic map.

Competing interests

The authors declare they have no competing interests.

Availability of data and materials

Not applicable.

Consent for publication

Ethics approval and consent to participate.

This manuscript is part of a project (3MK: Mapping the impacts of Mining using Multiple Knowledges) funded by a Formas Open Call Grant (2017-00683).

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Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Neal R. Haddaway, Biljana Macura & Annika E. Nilsson

Africa Centre for Evidence, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

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Haddaway, N.R., Cooke, S.J., Lesser, P. et al. Evidence of the impacts of metal mining and the effectiveness of mining mitigation measures on social–ecological systems in Arctic and boreal regions: a systematic map protocol. Environ Evid 8 , 9 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13750-019-0152-8

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Mining and Its Environmental Impacts

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All life forms.

Removal of something from active status.

Analysis of realizing the concept of creating goods and services with fewer resources and less waste and pollution.

Act of using something (mineral resources) for any purpose.

Process of finding mineral resources for the purpose of mining.

A geological feature in relatively soluble rocks, e.g., limestone, where sinkholes, caves, and similar hollows are formed above and below ground.

The outer rocky shell of planet Earth, comprising the oceanic and continental crust and part of the upper Earth mantle.

A change that will last or have an influence over a long period of time.

German for “sustainability,” first used in 1713 in Germany.

Process of extracting minerals from surface deposits.

Making raw mineral soils (brownfields) fertile again through bioengineering...

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Is gold mining part of the solution to climate change?

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John mulligan and john mulligan director and climate change lead - world gold council aloysius uche ordu aloysius uche ordu director - africa growth initiative , senior fellow - global economy and development @aloysiusordu.

August 16, 2023

• Gold mining companies should demonstrate their awareness of their impacts on society and local economies
• Responsible gold mining means working with civil society and consulting with governments
• We need to decarbonize mining, we need more minerals to allow us to decarbonize, and gold is part of that solution
• 34 min read

John Mulligan, climate change lead at the World Gold Council, talks with host Aloysius Ordu about the Council’s role in global gold markets, changes in those markets, and how gold mining can be part of the solution to climate change. Mulligan also looks ahead to the next global climate conference, COP28 in Dubai.

Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining , report from the World Gold Council.

“ Gold mining, climate change, and Africa’s transition ,” viewpoint in Foresight Africa 2023

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ORDU: I’m Aloysius Uche Ordu, director of the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution, and this is Foresight Africa podcast.

Since 2011, the Africa Growth Initiative at Brookings has published a high-profile report entitled Foresight Africa . The report covers key events and trends likely to shape affairs in Africa in the year ahead. On this podcast, I engage with the report authors as well as policymakers, industry leaders, Africa’s youths, and other key figures. Learn more on our website, Brookings dot edu slash Foresight Africa podcast.

ORDU: My guest today is Mr. John Mulligan. John is the director and climate change lead at the London-based World Gold Council, where he’s been working for the last two decades. John, a our warm welcome to our show.

MULLIGAN: Thank you and thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

ORDU: Let’s get started then. You serve as the director, as I mentioned earlier, and climate change lead at the World Gold Council. For the benefit of our listeners in Africa and elsewhere in the world, what exactly does the council do?

MULLIGAN: It’s a very good question. We were formed 35 years ago now by some of the large gold mining companies in the world who at the time, I think it’s fair to say, felt that they were somewhat disconnected from the gold markets. And that’s because in most of the world, it’s quite a long way from where gold is mined to where it’s consumed, with the exception of China. So there was a sense that what was happening in the markets was not well understood by the people producing gold. So they formed an organization called the World Gold Council to try and bridge that gap, to try and perhaps wherever possible contribute to what we call market development, to broadening the market, broadening accessibility to gold.

What’s happened over the last few decades is how we do that, how we implement our mandate, has very much changed. For the first two decades, we were probably very focused in the markets, developing investment markets, talking to regulators, developing product lines. But increasingly, I think, it’s become recognized that we have to look at the whole value chain and we have to look at that value chain to ensure that the product and the way it’s produced is both fit for purpose but also, if possible, minimizes negative impacts and maximizes value creation.

So, my role I started off as an investment and analysis, but over the last decade or so, I’ve also started to look at those the how we intervene or influence the value chain in terms of sustainability and what we now call ESG, environmental, social, and governance risks and opportunities.

ORDU: We’ll talk some more about this in a minute. And I just wondered, in the time you’ve been there, as you mentioned, over two decades or so, I know it’s impossible to capture all the things you’ve accomplished, but could you share with us just a few highlights?

MULLIGAN: There’s been some structural changes in the market. So first of all, there was concentration in gold production. If we were talking about the seventies and early eighties, South Africa still dominated go mining to some extent. It was certainly less distributed across the world in terms of where gold came from.

But when it comes to the destinations for gold—how gold is bought, how it’s consumed—that’s quite significant, and the World Gold Council has been, I think it’s fair to say, instrumental in opening up a lot of markets. We were very involved in opening up the Chinese market, for instance. It was illegal until the early 2000s for Chinese individuals to own gold as an investment. So it was a very small market. It was a very heavily controlled market. It is now the largest gold market in the world. Similarly, we were involved in opening up the Indian market.

And it’s quite significant that the opening up of the gold markets, whilst not causal, was quite concurrent with the broader development of those markets. And that’s true generally. So they were very significant cause they created structural change in the market.

Other structural changes have been introducing institutional investment to gold. So initially when the gold market started to open up in the seventies and eighties, big institutional investors didn’t really consider investing in gold at all. And even if they did, they weren’t sure how to. We created products and with the financial markets created efficient mechanisms. So they are very big structural changes in terms of the global gold market.

And I think in terms of how gold is produced and with a significant impact on the African context, basically firming up what we call responsible gold mining, saying, okay, how does how does the mining companies, how do they demonstrate both responsible practice but also how do they demonstrate that they are aware of their wider impacts in terms of society and local economies? And that’s been a gradual change, but over the last four or five years we’ve seen a real concerted effort to demonstrate that awareness of those impacts.

ORDU: Central banks are buying gold in unprecedented volumes given it’s the risk mitigation asset, as you know. Can you tell us about how your work is enabling central banks to become more sustainable?

MULLIGAN: So we have we’ve had a central bank policy and engagement team for many, many years. One of the things was literally just to make sure that central banks, particularly in developing economies that generally didn’t participate in gold, demonstrating to them the benefits of gold, meaning basically how they can diversify their reserve asset management systems and move away from concentration risk in one set or one currency based set of investments.

But also, more recently, we’ve been involved in bringing central banks to the table to discuss how they may possibly participate to the benefit of their local gold market. And what I mean by that is we, the board, our members, are the large scale miners to some of the industrialized miners. However, we’re very mindful that in a lot of developing and frontier economies, artisanal gold mining is both a major employer but also a potentially a major risk factor. It can generate a lot of jobs, relatively well-paying jobs, but they can come without much regulation. They can come often with very significant social and environmental risks.

And so one of the things we’ve done quite recently with the central banks is say those central banks that are aware of their local gold mining, aware of the artisanal gold production, they may be a potentially a force for good, a force by which they can have purchasing programs that encourage what we call formalization or more responsible practices in the host country, but also allow the local gold miner to have an access point to the international markets. And that’s one of the great challenges. Often local gold miners, artisanal gold miners, don’t have any clear route to fair market.

So it’s a relatively small program within the central bank scheme of our broader operations. But I think it is quite significant when we start to talk about gold mining in the African context.

ORDU: In 2019, I believe the World Gold Council launched the Responsible Gold Mining Principles. Could you explain what these principles are, briefly to us, please?

MULLIGAN: I can and I’m very glad you asked, because we for a long time, ever since I’ve been here, have been talking about responsible gold. When we’re talking about responsible, we’re talking about the gold market, we’re talking about responsible gold actors, responsible gold production.

But increasingly, over the last five years or so and maybe the last decade, there’s a lot greater scrutiny, a lot more questions asked—so what do you mean by that and how can you demonstrate it? So being aware of both societal expectations—civil society expectations and investor expectations—we said, okay, well, we need to define what we mean by this in detail, because we have almost a privileged access to a large group of gold producers, our members. We basically said working with them, working with civil society, working with many organizations in consultation with governments, et cetera, we will define what we mean by responsible gold mining. That became the responsible gold mining principles.

There are ten overarching principles which we think represent most of the material aspects and risks that we book it into kind of ESG. Actually, we start with G, we start with governance, and work down towards impact. And underneath those ten umbrella principles, there are 51 principles. They are, wherever possible, independently verified by external assurers. They are now mandatory for our membership. And our membership is well over half of all of corporate gold production in the world. So that means that by being mandatory, by being independently verified, we have made it quite clear what we perceive as both the expectations of gold mining, but also what their performance will look like and how they will demonstrate it that can be scrutinized by society and investors and other stakeholders.

So that’s what the RGMPs are for. We’re just coming towards the end of the first full reporting cycle. So the idea was to give the companies three years to get up to speed if they needed to before they started reporting publicly. Then reporting becomes an annual process in terms of verification and assurance. We’re coming to the end of that first cycle, which like I say, it was launched in 2019, started to become implemented in 2020, and now we’re looking for that reporting cycle to kick in very soon.

ORDU: So Africa, as you know, holds considerable resources vital to a clean energy future. The potentials to transform economic growth and to create jobs are huge for the continent. How do we ensure that Africa’s role in the global decarbonization journey is broadened beyond mineral extraction?

MULLIGAN: It’s a very good question. And I should contextualize that by the fact that the discussion around critical minerals and minerals that are needed to underpin the clean energy infrastructure, clean technology, renewable energy, et cetera, gold is not included in those. And I should make that really clear: gold is not seen as a critical mineral.

That said, it has some very critical roles to play when we talk about the gold value chain. And that is because gold in many remote locations and in many African contexts has to generate its own power. It has to generate its own power because there is no grid to plug into. And therefore if it is to decarbonize, it needs to bring clean energy infrastructure technology to those areas. And in doing so, the opportunities to then make some of that energy more widely available to communities. So you start to make local and clean energy transition technology available and economically viable to local economies. And I think that’s key.

However, to your broader question, I think the question is, and it’s one that we hear often in mining, how do you create a sustainable supply chain? How do you basically ensure that mining can not only commence and start to produce those minerals? How can the extraction of those minerals generate value that is shared by the host country or the host community?

Now, we spend a lot of time on this in gold mining because gold is of high value. There’s often a perception that the gold mining process extracts the mineral and extracts the majority of the value. We have spent over a decade now, again, and because of that privileged position of being able to ask the miners, we would like to know where the money goes. We’d like to track the money. Follow the money when it goes. Where do you spend your money in terms of taxes, royalties, suppliers, the income levels of your employees, et cetera? Where does the money go? And then how much money comes back to lenders of capital and shareholders, et cetera.

And certainly the vast majority over the last decade, it depends on where the gold market is, but typically between 60 and 80% of the money expended in gold mining actually remains in host countries. Most significantly, which often people often underestimate, is the significance of the money that goes to local employees and suppliers, providers. There has been a major effort over the last decade to encourage local supply chains to grow, to try and develop economic capacity.

The vast majority of employees, for instance, it’s no longer an expat industry. The vast majority of employees are 95% or more are typically employed from the host country. And I think that’s key.

What we’re seeing that’s also significant, and I think it’s true of all mining, but it’s one thing that the mining industry needs to communicate to its host countries and host governments, and it’s really important when we talk about the transition, is the shift in technologies, the shift in the nature of mining, and the shift in skill sets and opportunities.

Yes, it’s certainly a heavy industry. Yes, it involves a lot of hard labor, but increasingly it’s a high technology industry. Increasingly, those skills are transferable and I think that needs to be developed and far better explained to both host policymakers and stakeholders, because I think that allows—I’m talking about the gold market and gold in the gold mining industry—but it allows the broader industry to try and demonstrate its value and its broader purpose, which I think is not well communicated.

ORDU: Talking of supply chains, John, earlier this year you attended the OECD Responsible Minerals Forum in Paris. Governments worldwide, as you know, are seeking to build more secure supply chains. How can firms and governments work together to support more responsible practices? And do you have any examples of what has worked well in African countries, please?

MULLIGAN: It’s a very good question indeed and very topical. That forum on Responsible Sourcing of Minerals, it emerged from trying to create responsible minerals supply chains in the context in the context of potentially conflict affected areas. That’s what that policy grew out of. It’s now broadened its mandate to look at responsible mineral chains across the board. The question that most comes most comes up in that forum, the question that’s often the one that is seen as key to unlocking collaboration and potential, a question that is not always well answered is how to bring governments to the table in a collaborative way for a sustained period.

And I mentioned that sustained period because you mentioned some of the success stories. The problem with the success stories if they are not funded with a long-term view supported by the government—so they may be funded by development institutions or some development finance, but it’s relatively short-term—is the success story can be a success story for a while and it can cease to be when the funding stops or the development institution removes itself.

You need that long-term vision and long-term commitment from a group of actors, frankly, from business. Business often brings the capabilities, the capacity, some of the technologies, the skill sets. It also sometimes takes the risk particularly when we’re talking about new technologies and so on. And I think it sometimes can do that. Development banks often come in and may be taking some of that risk too, in terms of the initial stage of projects.

But I think what we really need, and I think what’s been perhaps lacking in the past, is the long term vision in terms of, okay, what is the joint objective of both corporate actors and governments? So there are some success stories, but the success stories have also often turned into failures, and so I’m hesitant to point them out. We were talking about them. And in the artisanal space, we’ve been looking at that really closely, saying, okay, well, how can large scale gold miners, along with international, supranational organizations and governments, come together to try and avoid those success stories that have failed and that have turned to failure in the past?

The World Gold Council is talking with organizations like the World Bank and so on to try and see how we might define what good practice looks like, find solutions, and find solutions that are enduring. That’s the real challenge.

ORDU: A key challenge indeed. John, you also you led an excellent report last year called “Lessons learned on managing the interface between the large scale and artisanal and small scale mining.” What were your key findings? And what’s the status of implementation of that report?

MULLIGAN: So I’ve already alluded to it. When I was fudging the answer to your previous question, I was actually alluding to some of the some of the content, some of the content in that report. And I can’t claim the glory for that report. Several of my colleagues, and particularly one called Edward Bickham, was very key in drafting that.

I think where it is now is when we published that, we’d already published the central bank case studies example of how central banks might intervene in terms of artisanal gold mining. So if you look at that report you mention, it covered a whole load of examples of what we might call attempts at good practice, potential solutions, both often initiated by large scale miners and pointed out where there had been some successes. As I say, a lot of those successes have not been enduring. Where we are now is trying to say, okay, well, what have we learned from bringing those lessons together?

And one of them has been, okay, well, can we find ways to incentivize government to come to the table at governments? So that’s a key. So one of the discussions with organizations like the World Bank is s their leverage from their perspective or in a collaboration to say, okay, well, let’s have a longer term perspectives on these projects. And so we are looking at those projects and engagement. We’ve got study groups and working groups where we’re trying to bring particular examples we can go back to in terms of good practice. It’s a little early for me to actually point to any specific project because frankly, we have just convened that group. We’ve had a number of meetings between state representatives, supernationals, mining companies in particular, gold miners in particular, many of whom are very, very eager to try and find a way to make this work.

There are some there are some examples of ASM mines working in corridors where they’ve been granted safe and secure tenure to develop and so on. But the real question is finding solutions that are scalable. The reason why they’re hesitating to highlight success stories is that a success story can almost overwhelm itself, meaning a number of artisanal miners can very much be given a secure, stable environment in which to operate. But if that becomes well-known, then you can have migration of larger numbers of people seeking similar opportunities, which frankly can overwhelm projects.

So that’s why I’m kind of saying you need to find success. You need to find the capacity to scale that success and it will always need governments to come to the table at some level.

ORDU: Fair enough. John, in response to a Bloomberg piece, you recently posted a message on LinkedIn that it is well worth repeating and very frequently that protecting nature is going to be expensive, but far less expensive than our destructive tendencies not to. Could you explain what you mean by that for the benefit of our listeners?

MULLIGAN: I’m first of all, I’m impressed somebody reads my LinkedIn page, so thank you for that. So often, and it’s true with climate and that’s kind of my specialization, but increasingly we’re looking at the broader what I call climate biodiversity intersections, because you need nature based solutions, you need to protect nature if we’re going to actually stabilize the climate, too. And the Bloomberg piece was useful because it put a number on what the annual cost will be to do this if we want to meet our nature protection, biodiversity protection goals. And I say that 1 trillion annual cost is seems very significant.

But the other big important thing is to put a cost on, as I say, cost of inaction, the cost of the cost of environmental degradation. And there’s a lot of time and effort now being put on trying to quantify the value of nature from an economic perspective. A lot of our economic activity’s underpinned by nature. Without it, we cannot do an awful lot of business. And so there’s an economic cost to inaction. And the economic cost, I think, was nearer 3 trillion if we don’t over time. So meaning that it there’s a net benefit, a net economic gain to biodiversity protection. This is not just about protecting the natural environment for us to enjoy at a kind of esthetical or a personal level. It is actually there are numbers to for hard-nosed business people and investment people to consider if they don’t reallocate capital or start building plans.

And so I think that once we got once we got numbers that basically start to make this real for investment folk, strategy makers who are also very focused on protecting economic opportunity, then I think it becomes meaningful for everybody. And the price of inaction is often something we fail to cost in it in terms of both valuations and our long-term estimates of economic growth and social development. So yeah, the cost of inaction, I think putting a number on it, it crystallizes the issue for many people.

ORDU: Those are those are no the numbers you mentioned, those are staggering numbers indeed. And yeah, it’s astounding. John, I recall earlier this year that you also you attended the Mining Indaba in Cape Town. In fact, we spoke while you were still there in Cape Town, South Africa. What were the key highlights and conclusions from the Indaba, what’s your take on the mining sector’s progress so far in terms of decarbonization? And what are some of the quick wins that can be made?

MULLIGAN: An immediate take away from the Indaba and from frankly a lot of the mining events I’ve attended, is that everybody now recognizes that mining is absolutely a core part of the solution to climate change. So this idea of the volume of critical minerals that will be needed to enable us to decarbonize is very significant. So we need to create a virtuous circle, meaning we need more mining, but we need to minimize negative impacts. And actually, as I say, maximize the positive.

Meanwhile, mining itself has to decarbonize because what is the point of producing more metals for decarbonization if you’re also pumping more carbon into the atmosphere? So we need decarbonize mining, we need more of these minerals, and very significantly I think that is now recognized. And so you have a sense of optimism to some extent in the mining community because they know that there is this significant demand for their material and therefore the industry should be in a good state to consider growth. Growth, hopefully, as I say, with a very clear sighted perspective on minimizing negative impacts.

But in terms of the state of decarbonization, well, there’s a lot to be optimistic about and I obviously know the mining industry best and the gold mining industry’s path to decarbonization—the low hanging fruit, the ability for it to decarbonize at speed and scale is, as I’ve mentioned before, an energy story. It is both the energy story, its ability to shift where it generates its own power from diesel and heavy fuel oil in particular to renewables. And also where it’s plugged into a grid, its ability to influence either the grid provider, the provider of the electricity, or to influence the policy environment to allow renewables to prosper.

And the example I always mentioned there is South Africa, where all industry pretty much was dependent on Eskom. It was a monopoly and it’s largely coal fired and therefore a very high carbon source of energy. And it was the precious metals, not solely, but the precious metals miners in particular who had long been trying to pressurize the government to say we need to be able to self-generate or to move away from Eskom if Eskom doesn’t move quickly enough. We have to and you have to allow us to do that.

So the removal of the cap, the limit on how industry could self-generate power, allowed in South Africa a renewable energy industry to prosper. It would have been economically unviable for renewable to prosper at scale because frankly the Eskom monopoly inhibited it. But I think that’s changed. I was in South Africa down a deep mine, one of the deepest in the world, and you come up to the surface and there is a brand new solar array and that solar array is already growing its capacity. So they had the ability to both self-generate to influence energy systems, I think that’s a major opportunity for go mining.

And it’s not just in developing economies. You see the great success stories in gold mining in parts of remote parts of Australia where renewables are now powering mines to the point that the majority of power in some mines is now renewables.

I think the mining industry has to both articulate its purpose in terms of how the host countries will benefit from that and it also has to support the building of capacity and infrastructure. And this is what the downside or the negative that I took away from Indaba was some of the conversations in the ministerial forums that I participated in where there was still a quite understandable, completely rational need to prioritize energy poverty. We said, okay, well let us use whatever resources we’ve got to address that first before we look at the issue of decarbonization.

I think if an industry, and gold mining is fortunate to be in this position, if an industry is a strategic contributor to the to a host economy, it may also have a strategic role in expanding the capacity of that country to embrace renewables. And I think that’s quite a key point. It does hopefully go back to your previous question about the possible role or opportunities for government and business to collaborate.

ORDU: Yeah. In fact, for the benefit of our listeners, I’ll turn now to John, your brilliant essay in Foresight Africa 2023 titled “Gold mining, climate change, and Africa’s transition.” Many, many, many of the issues we’re discussing here and the points you’ve made basically are well captured, succinctly captured, in that brilliant essay. In particular, you also wrote about how gold mining can be of strategic importance in catalyzing positive change, which you just spoke about now, especially when we consider the urgent need to mitigate climate change’s destructive impacts via rapid decarbonization. Can you explain a bit more, John, on how gold mining companies in Africa are contributing to this lower carbon footprint? In addition to the South Africa example you already cited?

MULLIGAN: So if you look in many countries in Africa and you look for the first mover, who brought and proved the viability of a renewable energy source, in many countries it is gold mining. So in Burkina Faso, the largest solar array is at the Essakane Project, which is a JV between the mine and the local government. That’s the largest solar array in that country. There is one in the planning stage, which is another gold mining company seeking to also build a substantial solar array.

If you look at hydropower in DRC, Kibali is a great story. Kibali was an artisanal gold mining area with an old dam I think that was left from the Belgian colonial times. That hydro dam has been developed. There have been now three additional hydro dams have been developed proving that the clean energy can be expanded.

But really interesting for me is that the people who built those dams gradually became a local business. So the last dam was actually somebody from the area. And that that business is now trying seeking to export those skills, the ability to build hydro power to other African nations. So it’s not only the ability to bring the technology to a country where basically there may be no capacity, there may be no frankly, maybe no political will to actually create a renewable project at scale, or at least not to absorb the risk that may be seen or perceived in such projects. But by doing so, I think gold miners have proved it, and then they create the capacity which could expand.

And as I mentioned, the great example of somebody who started work at one of those hydro dams many years ago and now owns a business which is actually exporting its abilities potentially to other African nations. I think that’s quite significant.

ORDU: John, you participated in COP27, Africa’s COP, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. What were you expectations going in and where those expectations met?

MULLIGAN: The COP question is always a good one. I have never heard this answered in any other way but half empty, half full. So the question with COP is the road to COP is often more significant than COP itself, because the road to COP is where the negotiations start, where the expectations are set. The positives, and there were some, I think, well, first of all we have seen in recent cops the very significant participation of business and investment. So COPs historically have often been governments haggling over their contributions and their targets and so on. And that’s still obviously core to what a COP is under the UNFCCC.

But nonetheless, we’ve seen business investors now coming to COP to try and accelerate progress and discuss reallocation of capital—I think that’s really quite significant—to hopefully support what governments have committed to. And so I think that was something that’s useful to see at COP. The biodiversity agreement which came out of COP was quite key. I know there’s the biodiversity came out to the biodiversity conference, which was not the same COP, but there was a lot of discussion of the overlap and a lot of momentum was set in terms of we need to address both at once.

I think there has been some clarity now in terms of decarbonization and movement away from fossil fuels. It emerged from Glasgow, but it’s kind of consolidated, we hope it’s consolidated. So I think there’s a lot to be said of what comes out of COP. And very significantly from an African-hosted COP, the issue of commitments to aid, adaptation, and resilience, which had often been neglected at COP, it had often been net zero decarbonization.

But this issue of the people who are unfortunately enduring the lived experience of climate change, the people who are enduring some of those really hard physical impacts, they need clear assistance in building resilience and adapting to those physical impacts. And that’s always been there since Paris, but it’s never really been given the time and the attention it needed to say, okay, how do we translate that? There’s always been some money potentially on the table. In fact, there’s been some money promised, but it wasn’t really addressed properly in this COP. I expect it to also be addressed in the UAE in the next COP.

So I think this issue of balancing the needs to decarbonize at scale and speed with this also pressing issue of building adaptation for the most vulnerable, I think that’s something which we expect that too to become a completely balanced argument because this whole issue of a just transition and has to be clarified. For many, the just transition seems to be climate change was not our fault historically, and therefore why should we decarbonize? Why can we not exploit our fossil fuel reserves? And there’s a logic to that. There’s a fairness to that.

At the same time, we’re all in this together. We all have to decarbonize. So we have to make sure that the COP discussion embraces that balance between rapid decarbonization and the ability to fund adaptation and resilience. And I think the conversations around COP, if I was to be positive, they seem to be a little more balanced in recent years.

ORDU: That certainly came across in Sharm el-Sheikh. You mentioned UAE, I’m just wondering, John, as we approach COP28, now billed the investment COP in Dubai and later this year, how is the Gold Council preparing for this COP?

MULLIGAN: It’s something that’s very high on my agenda, as you can imagine. First of all, as the question is, there is only a point in being at a COP if you have something to say. There’s thousands and thousands of people all talking at the same time, a COP. And so you have to bring something to the table. And for me, it is this idea of trying to create a rounded solution or position when it comes to climate risks. So we’ve, we looked recently at physical risk. We looked at adaptation resilience in terms of what that means at the gold mine site, but also what it might mean to wider communities particularly in vulnerable locations.

I think this issue of starting to consider nature and broader environmental impacts is also now key, which is what I’m kind of looking at and trying to see how that discussion is developing at COP. It’s certainly developing as we move towards COP. There’s not a climate event I’ve been to recently, should I say, that hasn’t been 30, 40% now a nature-biodiversity discussion. So, I’m interested in that.

The investment side is really interesting. As I say, we have seen very significant discussions. We saw in Glasgow the emergence of GFANZ, which we’ve seen these big institutional investor clusters who are all committing to both limiting their exposure to carbon intense assets but also facilitating and decarbonization in terms of asset allocation, where the money goes.

I think you would hope, given the fact this is billed as an investment COP, that that that conversation is comes to the fore. But really importantly, I think it needs to start joining up the investor perspective with the governmental perspective. And that’s kind of what’s often missing. Where do the government’s nationally determined contributions—what a government has said it will do about carbon, its commitments, its commitments emerging from Paris and restated successive COPs—how does that interact? How does it engage and hopefully be mutually supportive of corporate action and corporate finance and so on. And I think that conversation, the two are often parallel, but hopefully we can bring them together. If you have something called an investment COP, that’s what we would hope it would be for.

ORDU: Appropriately termed: investment, we do hope what materializes is what you just articulated. So, John, as we wind up, what advice I’m just wondering here, would you give Africa’s negotiators and policymakers on how best to prepare to achieve a better outcome for the continent in COP28?

MULLIGAN: A little small, simple question to end on, thank you. I think there’s a number of things which anybody who’s been kind of engaged in the climate change discussion cannot avoid. And yet constantly it’s disappointing when you see some of the discussions in practice. One, you need long-term vision. You need long-term strategy. These are objectives and problems that need us to look to a longer term than the next quarter, the next year, or even the next ten year of a particular political regime. So you need to consider what is good for the national interest, but what is good for the planet over the long term.

And what that means it’s in some points, I would say, greater collaboration. So in the African context, for instance, there’s lots of examples of how if countries—and again I’ll return back to decarbonization—if countries sought to complement each other’s natural resources, and by this I mean the sunshine, the wind, the water, and pool resources to be more complementary, they would have both more stable power systems and more affordable power systems.

You need some of those discussions regarding a kind of a regional interest. By region, I mean obviously very large regions, many countries talking to each other to try and achieve a long term objective. So it’s a long, long answer. But long term is absolutely key to this, I think. Courage and bravery to put the interests of people beyond the immediate political interests of the party or even a short term agenda, I think, is important. And unfortunately, that sometimes gets lost in the very the very understandable, rational, short-term problems that basically are obviously high on the agenda of many policymakers.

But as I say, these problems are so these problems are so large that, frankly, any one government would not solve them. You have to basically collaborate. And we’ve already mentioned it: basically, you need to bring responsible actors, investors into the fold, create amenable, stable environments to allow to allow value to be both created and distributed in a stable, long-term fashion. And I think that stability, that long term view is key.

ORDU: So I’ve been speaking to John Mulligan. He’s the director and climate change lead at the London-based World Gold Council. John, it’s been a pleasure speaking to you this morning. Thank you very much for joining our podcast.

MULLIGAN: Thank you again. It’s been delightful.

ORDU: I’m Aloysius Uche Ordu, and this has been Foresight Africa. To learn more about what you just heard today, you can find this episode online at Brookings dot edu slash Foresight Africa podcast.

The Foresight Africa podcast is brought to you by the Brookings Podcast Network. Send your feedback and questions to podcasts at Brookings dot edu. My special thanks to the production team, including Kuwilileni Hauwanga, supervising producer; Fred Dews, producer; Nicole Ntunigre and Sakina Djantchiemo, associate producers; and Gastón Reboredo, audio engineer.

The show’s art was designed by Shavanthi Mendis based on the concept by the creative from Blossom. Additional support for this podcast comes from my colleagues at Brookings Global and the Office of Communications at Brookings.

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Global Economy and Development

South Africa Sub-Saharan Africa West Africa

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Anwar Aridi, Jeong-Dong Lee

May 1, 2024

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Understanding the impact of deep-sea mining

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Resting atop Thomas Peacock’s desk is an ordinary-looking brown rock. Roughly the size of a potato, it has been at the center of decades of debate. Known as a polymetallic nodule, it spent 10 million years sitting on the deep seabed, 15,000 feet below sea level. The nodule contains nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese — four minerals that are essential in energy storage.

“As society moves toward driving more electric vehicles and utilizing renewable energy, there will be an increased demand for these minerals, to manufacture the batteries necessary to decarbonize the economy,” says Peacock, a professor of mechanical engineering and the director of MIT’s Environmental Dynamics Lab (END Lab). He is part of an international team of researchers that has been trying to gain a better understanding the environmental impact of collecting polymetallic nodules, a process known as deep-sea mining.

The minerals found in the nodules, particularly cobalt and nickel, are key components of lithium-ion batteries. Currently, lithium-ion batteries offer the best energy density of any commercially available battery. This high energy density makes them ideal for use in everything from cellphones to electric vehicles, which require large amounts of energy within a compact space.

“Those two elements are expected to see a tremendous growth in demand due to energy storage,” says Richard Roth, director of MIT’s Materials Systems Laboratory.

While researchers are exploring alternative battery technologies such as sodium-ion batteries and flow batteries that utilize electrochemical cells, these technologies are far from commercialization.

“Few people expect any of these lithium-ion alternatives to be available in the next decade,” explains Roth. “Waiting for unknown future battery chemistries and technologies could significantly delay widespread adoption of electric vehicles.”

Vast amounts of specialty nickel will be also needed to build larger-scale batteries that will be required as societies look to shift from an electric grid powered by fossil fuels to one powered by renewable resources like solar, wind, wave, and thermal.

“The collection of nodules from the seabed is being considered as a new means for getting these materials, but before doing so it is imperative to fully understand the environmental impact of mining resources from the deep ocean and compare it to the environmental impact of mining resources on land,” explains Peacock.

After receiving seed funding from MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), Peacock was able to apply his expertise in fluid dynamics to study how deep-sea mining could affect surrounding ecosystems.

Meeting the demand for energy storage

Currently, nickel and cobalt are extracted through land-based mining operations. Much of this mining occurs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which produces 60 percent of the world’s cobalt. These land-based mines often impact surrounding environments through the destruction of habitats, erosion, and soil and water contamination. There are also concerns that land-based mining, especially in politically unstable countries, might not be able to supply enough of these materials as the demand for batteries rises.

The swath of ocean located between Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States — also  known as the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone — is estimated to possess six times more cobalt and three times more nickel than all known land-based stores, as well as vast deposits of manganese and a substantial amount of copper.

While the seabed is abundant with these materials, little is known about the short- and long-term environmental effects of mining 15,000 feet below sea level. Peacock and his collaborator Professor Matthew Alford from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California at San Diego are leading the quest to understand how the sediment plumes generated by the collection of nodules from the seabed will be carried by water currents.

“The key question is, if we decide to make a plume at site A, how far does it spread before eventually raining down on the sea floor?” explains Alford. “That ability to map the geography of the impact of sea floor mining is a crucial unknown right now.”

The research Peacock and Alford are conducting will help inform stakeholders about the potential environmental effects of deep-sea mining. One pressing matter is that draft exploitation regulations for deep-sea mining in areas beyond national jurisdiction are currently being negotiated by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), an independent organization established by the United Nations that regulates all mining activities on the sea floor. Peacock and Alford’s research will help guide the development of environmental standards and guidelines to be issued under those regulations.

“We have a unique opportunity to help regulators and other concerned parties to assess draft regulations using our data and modeling, before operations start and we regret the impact of our activity,” says Carlos Munoz Royo, a PhD student in MIT’s END Lab.

Tracking plumes in the water

In deep-sea mining, a collector vehicle would be deployed from a ship. The collector vehicle then travels 15,000 feet down to the seabed, where it vacuums up the top four inches of the seabed. This process creates a plume known as a collector plume.

“As the collector moves across the seabed floor, it stirs up sediment and creates a sediment cloud, or plume, that’s carried away and distributed by ocean currents,” explains Peacock.

The collector vehicle picks up the nodules, which are pumped through a pipe back to the ship. On the ship, usable nodules are separated from unwanted sediment. That sediment is piped back into the ocean, creating a second plume, known as a discharge plume.

Peacock collaborated with Pierre Lermusiaux, professor of mechanical engineering and of ocean science and engineering, and Glenn Flierl, professor of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences, to create mathematical models that predict how these two plumes travel through the water.

To test these models, Peacock set out to track actual plumes created by mining the floor of the Pacific Ocean. With funding from MIT ESI, he embarked on the first-ever field study of such plumes. He was joined by Alford and Eric Adams, senior research engineer at MIT, as well as other researchers and engineers from MIT, Scripps, and the United States Geological Survey.

With funding from the UC Ship Funds Program, the team conducted experiments in consultation with the ISA during a weeklong expedition in the Pacific Ocean aboard the U.S. Navy R/V Sally Ride in March 2018. The researchers mixed sediment with a tracer dye that they were able to track using sensors on the ship developed by Alford’s Multiscale Ocean Dynamics group . In doing so, they created a map of the plumes’ journeys.

The field experiments demonstrated that the models Peacock and Lermusiaux developed can be used to predict how plumes will travel through the water — and could help give a clearer picture of how surrounding biology might be affected.

Impact on deep-sea organisms

Life on the ocean floor moves at a glacial pace. Sediment accumulates at a rate of 1 millimeter every millennium. With such a slow rate of growth, areas disturbed by deep-sea mining would be unlikely to recover on a reasonable timescale.

“The concern is that if there is a biological community specific to the area, it might be irretrievably impacted by mining,” explains Peacock. 

According to Cindy Van Dover, professor of biological oceanography at Duke University, in addition to organisms that live in or around the nodules, other organisms elsewhere in the water column could be affected as the plumes travel.

“There could be clogging of filter feeding structures of, for example, gelatinous organisms in the water column, and burial of organisms on the sediment,” she explains. “There could also be some metals that get into the water column, so there are concerns about toxicology.”

Peacock’s research on plumes could help biologists like Van Dover assess collateral damage from deep-sea mining operations in surrounding ecosystems.

Drafting regulations for mining the sea

Through connections with MIT’s Policy Lab , the Institute is one of only two research universities with observer status at the ISA.

“The plume research is very important, and MIT is helping with the experimentation and developing plume models, which is vital to inform the current work of the International Seabed Authority and its stakeholder base,” explains Chris Brown, a consultant at the ISA. Brown was one of dozens of experts who convened on MIT’s campus last fall at a workshop discussing the risks of deep-sea mining.

To date, the field research Peacock and Alford conducted is the only ocean dataset on midwater plumes that exists to help guide decision-making. The next step in understanding how plumes move through the water will be to track plumes generated by a prototype collector vehicle. Peacock and his team in the END Lab are preparing to participate in a major field study using a prototype vehicle in 2020.

Peacock and Lermusiaux hope to develop models that give increasingly accurate predictions about how deep-sea mining plumes will travel through the ocean. They will continue to interact with academic colleagues, international agencies, NGOs, and contractors to develop a clearer picture of deep-sea mining’s environmental impact.

“It’s important to have input from all stakeholders early in the conversation to help make informed decisions, so we can fully understand the environmental impact of mining resources from the ocean and compare it to the environmental impact of mining resources on land,” says Peacock.

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Coal Mining (1978)

Chapter: summary, conclusions, and recommendations.

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I SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS A. SUMMARY The Panel on Coal Mining Technology of the NRC Committee on Processing and Utilization of Fossil Fuels was appointed to access the distribution and quality of the nation's coal reserves, underground and surface mining techniques, processing techniques, manpower and transportation requirements, the environmental impact of coal mining, and other social and regulatory issues. The worsening energy shortage and the recent decline in coal mining productivity stimulated the Panel to consider all factors influencing coal mining activities so that it could make recommendations for improving the environmental acceptability of coal mining and the health and safety of miners while also increasing productivity and improving the economics of coal mining. B. CONCLUSIONS 1. Coal is the nation's most abundant fossil fuel; yet, it is used to fill only 19 percent of the nation's energy needs. We11-identified recoverable coal reserves exist within the United States in sufficient quantity and with suitable mining characteristics (estimated to be 232 billion tons) to provide an annual production 3.5 times the 1976 production for the next 100 years. 2. Filling these requirements at a reasonable cost requires that the recent decrease in coal productivity per man-day, particularly in underground mining, be reversed without sacrificing health and safety standards. An increase in productivity will decrease coal mine capital and operating costs, and each ton of increased productivity per man-day can be expected to save the nation approximately $7 billion (1975 dollars) in the price paid for coal over the next 10 years. A reduction in wildcat strikes, absenteeism, and labor turnover and an improvement in worker training and acceptance of grievance procedures would make important contributions to improved productivity. 3. Increased amounts of coal (except metallurgical coal) can be expected to come primarily from: (a) surface minable reserves in North Dakota, Montana, Wyoiring, New Mexico, and Texas; (b) reserves in the Eastern Interior Field (i.e., Illinois, Indiana, and Western Kentucky); and (c) underground reserves in Utah, Colorado, Montana, and

Wyoming. The Appalachian Region will continue to supply a significant part of the nation's coal, including increased amounts for export and metallurgical purposes. 1. Much of the available coal in the eastern United States and significant tonnages of low-rank western coal, as mined or as physically cleaned using available techniques, cannot meet present SO2 emission standards. 5. Existing mining systems improved by a greater degree of mechanization and automatic control will continue to be used for at least the next 10 years. Improvements in underground mining systems and machinery are expected to result in increased productivity and improved miner health and safety. 6. Although no urgent coal-mining manpower shortage presently exists, the projected growth, attrition, and retirement replacement rate in the mining population indicates that manpower requirements are likely to double by 1990. Current education and training programs for new miners and mining engineers are of great value in achieving productivity, health and safety, and environmental objectives. 7. The need to move coal or its energy over increasingly long distances requires that environmentally acceptable, low-cost transportation systems be utilized. Possible methods include greater application of unit trains, water shipments, slurry pipelines, mine-mouth power plants with extra-high-voltage and ultra-high-voltage transmission lines, and mine-mouth conversion of coal to liquid or gaseous fuels with pipeline transmission. 8. More rapid transportation of coal from the mining face and improved roof support are required if productivity is to increase. Methane removal, dust control, and ventilation also are important areas for health and safety research in underground mining. Improved extraction and reclamation equipment, including integrated mining and reclamation systems, are required in surface mining. 9. A national energy policy that defines the role of coal in meeting future energy requirements is needed to encourage industry to make the long-range capital commitments necessary to develop domestic coal reserves to assist the nation in meeting basic energy needs. C. RECOMMENDATIONS 1. The use of coal and its by-products should be increased substantially during the next 25 years, with coal being used to provide a substantially larger portion of fixed-base energy requirements.

2. Federal, state, and local regulations concerning mine operation and the opening of new mines should be limited, consolidated, and coordinated to simplify procedures, permit timely decision-making, and encourage more rapid application of technological advances. 3. The coal industry, state governments, the federal government, and the universities should strengthen programs for recruiting, educating, training, retraining, and providing work experience for mining personnel. These programs should focus on high school graduates as well as persons having higher degrees, and funding should be provided for new facilities and for the operating and maintenance expenses of existing mining engineering schools. 4. Underground mining productivity per man-day should be increased at least to the levels achieved in the late 1960s while meeting health and safety standards, through improved labor-management relations, improved regulating climate, improved training programs, and broader application of improved mining technology. 5. Health, safety, and environmental conditions in underground mines should be improved by the application of better methods for removing methane gas from the coal seam prior to mining, the development of better roof control and ventilation and dust control equipment, and the increased utilization of automated equipment. 6. The environmental conditions in existing and new mining areas should be maintained and, if possible, improved. In underground mining, this will involve controlling drainage, acid mine water, refuse piles, dust, noise, and subsidence and in surface mining, maintaining the optimum environmental conditions for reclamation of the mined areas. 7. Clean, low-cost systems for moving coal or transporting its energy from the mine over long distances should be utilized and further developed. 8. An information program designed to inform the public of opportunities in the coal mining industry should be developed and adequately funded to stimulate the interest of young Americans in a mining career in the coal industry. This will contribute to meeting future energy needs.

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33 Causes, Effects & Solutions for Mining

“ Mining is like a search-and-destroy mission”

Stewart Udall

Mining: Causes, Effects & Solutions

Mining can be defined as the extraction of minerals or other geological materials from our earth.

In the mining process, several resources can be recovered, including coal, metals, limestone, potash, clay and much more.

Mining is done with the goal to obtain materials which cannot be obtained at the surface and can also not be created artificially in an economically-senseful way.

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The types, causes, effects of mining and solutions to the problem are presented below.

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Types of mining, surface mines, underground mines, in-situ mining, placer mining.

Surface mines are often used for the recovery of less valuable resources which are located near the surface.

Underground mines are usually more expensive and are often used to recover more valuable resources that are located deeper inside the ground.

In-situ mining is used to obtain uranium.

Along with the uranium, additional elements like selenium, arsenic or lead are also extracted.

Placer mining is usually done in river beds or on beaches with the goal of separating precious metals out of the sand.

Causes for Mining

Population growth, income growth, increasing demand for resources, single source of income, advancements in technology, importance for industrial processes, lack in substitutability, economic factor for countries, increase in resource prices.

One cause of mining is population growth .

With an increasing population, the overall world consumption levels also increase.

This means that in order to be able to provide enough goods for the world population, resources have to be extracted at large scale.

One great possibility to extract these resources is mining.

There are several different kinds of mines, including coal, iron and also diamond mines.

Since our demand for all these goods increases at a steady rate, we have to increase our mining activities in order to provide these goods to our population.

No generation had an overall global income that is higher than we have it today.

Through the industrial revolution, we are able to produce large numbers of goods which have a quite low unit price.

Especially in the Western world, almost everybody has at least one car.

Almost everybody goes on vacation several times a year.

However, this lifestyle is not sustainable in the long run since we will run out of resources in the long run.

Therefore, income growth and an overall high world income level also lead to more mining since industries want to meet the worldwide demand for goods.

Not only the overall world consumption level is increasing, also on an individual level, consumption behaviors increases.

This is especially true in developing countries.

Many people now aspire to a similar consumption-extensive lifestyle as we do in the Western world.

However, this also means that the resource demand of many people also increases accordingly.

This consumption behavior leads to more mining since in order to meet the demand, industries have to extract more resources out of our earth.

For many people, mining is the only source of income they can generate.

Hence, this means that people rely on their mining jobs in order to survive.

In many developing countries, mining is done by accepting severe health threats.

For example, there are African gold mines in which gold is separated with the help of mercury.

Workers often do this process by using their hands without any protection.

This behavior usually leads to contamination of these people which eventually leads to death.

This example shows how dependent certain people are on the mining industry.

They risk their life since this is the only way for them to create enough income.

Technological progress is also positively correlated with more mining.

With our nowadays technology, it is easier and more profitable to extract resources out of the ground compared to past centuries where mining was much more difficult since there were no machines and workers had to work quite hard in order to be able to extract resources.

Therefore, advancements in technology also contribute to an increase in mining activities.

Many resources extracted in mining processes are quite important for industrial purposes.

Industries urgently need metals, oil and other resources to produce goods for our daily life in order to meet the demand of people.

You can find small amounts of gold in many electronic devices, including your computer.

In our technological world, we rely on a sufficient supply of metals.

Thus, since we need many different resources to be able to live our current lifestyle, we also need mining on a large scale.

As already mentioned, we need metals and other resources for many different purposes and products in our daily life.

Moreover, there is a lack of substitutability for these resources, meaning that metals like gold cannot be replaced in an efficient manner by other resources.

A lack of substitutability therefore means that mining activities are essential and will also be crucial in the future in order to supply enough resources to meet the demand.

Natural resources are a great economic factor for many countries.

Especially for poor developing countries, the extraction of natural resources often is the biggest source of income.

This means, in order to be able to supply enough basic goods for locals, these countries have to extract large amounts of resources out of the ground.

However, in many cases, people who work in the mines are just paid quite a low wage while mine owners usually make big profits.

Mine owners often exploit the local workers since they know that the workers do not have an alternative and have to accept the bad working conditions.

This means that mining contributes to an increase in wealth for some, but not for many.

However, since mining is an important source of income for countries and mine owners, it is still quite practical to sustain or even increase mining activities.

The worldwide prices for precious metals like gold and many other resources have increased significantly over the last decades.

This makes it even more profitable to extract resources out of the ground since these resources can be sold for higher prices on the world market.

Effects of Mining

Hearing issues, heavy metal contamination, lung diseases, biodiversity loss, water pollution, air pollution, soil pollution, effects on animals, effects on plants, effects on aquatic life, effects through the food chain, deforestation, global warming, destruction of vegetation cover.

Mining is a dangerous craft.

Many miners get injured during their work.

Miners can be hit by stones falling on their heads or also may be buried by mines which collapsed.

There are also injuries from maintaining or repairing activities, especially on hands and fingers which in some cases have to be amputated.

Moreover, working in mines can also lead to back and shoulder strains.

In some mines, even child labor is used in order to maximize profits.

These children are even at greater risk for injuries since they are less experienced regarding the dangers of mining.

There are several fatalities that can be linked to mining each year.

Especially in poor developing countries with low safety standards, many workers die each year from mining activities.

When mines collapse, the workers underground usually have low chances to survive since they will not have enough oxygen available and may also die from a lack of drinking water.

Thus, working in mines can be quite dangerous and may even take your life.

Hearing damages are another quite common effect when it comes to working in mines.

Some machines that are used for mining purposes can be quite loud.

If the workers are not properly protected, they can suffer from severe hearing losses.

This problem is especially severe in countries with low safety standards.

If the mine owners do not care about their employees, the workers are likely to lose their hearing capacities after a few years.

Therefore, mining can also lead to hearing damages if workers are not protected properly.

For the extraction of certain materials like gold, in many countries, mercury or other extremely toxic substances are used.

Workers often do this extraction process without wearing protection like gloves.

Therefore, they get contaminated and will suffer from severe health issues and even death in the near future. Thus, their life expectancy often is dramatically low.

Mining can also contribute to the problem of cancer.

People working in mines are especially at risk of lung cancer, since they often inhale toxic dust and other harmful gases which come as by-product in the mining process.

Apart from cancer, there are several other lung diseases workers in mines often suffer from.

Especially at risk are workers who do not wear protective masks or other forms of protection.

In developed countries, workers usually wear suitable protection measures against harmful substances.

However, in many poor countries, safety and health standards are much lower and the mineworkers in these countries often suffer from lung issues.

Mining also contributes to a loss in biodiversity .

In order to meet the increasing demand for natural resources, mining activities have to be increased as well.

This means that many areas that previously had been untouched by humans are now invaded for mining purposes.

This invasion leads to biodiversity loss since many animals and plants lose their natural habitats .

They are forced to move or will even die since they are not able to adapt to the changed circumstances.

Moreover, pollution from mining may further destroy their environments and also contaminate all kinds of life forms.

Since mining often includes the extraction of metals and other resources deep under the surface, it can lead to serious erosions.

These erosions may in turn lead to a state where the eroded land is no longer suitable for human use like housing or farming since the soil is too unstable and poses too many dangers of further erosion.

Mining can also lead to water pollution .

Many mining companies, especially in poor countries, deposit the by-products of mining near rivers or lakes in order to get rid of them.

However, through rain, these by-products which often contain harmful elements may be washed into the rivers, lakes or also into the soil.

This in turn will also lead to contamination of our drinking water.

Therefore, mining can also lead to water pollution if there is not enough regulation regarding the disposal of harmful by-products.

Mining also leads to air pollution .

For mining purposes, big machines are often used in order to make the mining process more effective and to reduce the physical work for miners.

However, these machines emit large amounts of harmful gases, also including greenhouse gases like methane or CO2.

Thus, mining can also cause air pollution and the implied consequences.

Soil pollution is another issue that can be caused by mining activities.

In the extraction process, large amounts of material are moved.

This material, apart from the precious resources, may also contain harmful elements.

These elements are likely to be set free through the mining process and therefore may contaminate the surrounding soil.

Moreover, if the waste products from mining are not treated and disposed of in an appropriate manner, they are likely to contaminate the soil as well.

There are several adverse effects of mining on animals.

Since for the mining process, large areas of land have to be used, many animals will lose their natural habitat.

This may force these animals to move.

If they do not find a new habitat, they may even die since they are usually quite sensitive to changes in their natural living conditions and may not be able to adjust fast enough.

Moreover, animals may be contaminated by harmful by-products of mining.

This could include the contamination with mercury or other highly toxic substances which usually significantly lowers the life expectancy of the contaminated animals.

Mining can also have severe adverse effects on plants.

Plants usually require a certain pH-level to grow.

This pH-level is often altered through mining activities.

Thus, many plants will no longer grow efficiently and will lose their fertility which may lead to the local extinction of some plant species.

There are also some adverse effects of mining on aquatic life.

Since many harmful by-products of mining often reach water bodies due to inappropriate disposal by mining companies, all kinds of water animals will suffer from toxic compounds.

This may include the contamination of fishes with heavy materials or even radioactive substances.

Therefore, aquatic life may be affected by mining activities in a dramatic manner.

Since we are at the top of the food chain, we will also be adversely affected by the adverse effects of mining on animals and plants since we are likely to consume them in later stages of the food cycle.

For example, when we consume fish that is contaminated with heavy metals, we can also suffer diseases since we get contaminated by these heavy metals as well.

Mining also often leads to the deforestation of large areas.

In order to meet the worldwide demand for resources, mining companies have to expand their territories which means turning forest land into land that can be mined.

This implies the deforestation in these areas.

Thus, mining also contributes to the worldwide deforestation issue and the related harmful effects to our environment.

Mining also indirectly contributes to global warming .

For mining purposes, big machines that emit large amounts of harmful gases are frequently used.

These gases also include greenhouse gases like CO2 and methane which contribute to global warming.

Moreover, since an increase in mining activities also implies an increase in deforestation, this also contributes to global warming since trees are natural storage spaces for greenhouse gases like CO2.

Through deforestation, we lose these storage spaces and the global warming process will be enhanced because of this behavior.

Moreover, some of the vegetation cover is likely to be destroyed due to mining practices.

In areas that are close to the mining location, pH-levels are likely to be altered due to chemicals or other reactions.

This can lead to a destruction of the vegetation cover since plants are usually quite sensitive to altered acidity levels.

Solutions for the Mining Problem

Government regulations, reduce consumption, reuse and recycle, nature reserves, convince others.

One important measure against the potential adverse effects of mining on our environment is government regulation and restriction .

Authorities have to make sure that mining is done in a responsible manner.

This includes the protection of workers and also the protection of local wildlife and plants.

In some countries, there are already quite strict regulations related to mining practices.

However, in many countries, especially in poor developing countries, there are often quite low safety standards in place.

This has to be changed in order to mitigate the adverse effects related to mining.

Our excessive consumption levels also contribute to the problems caused by mining.

In our daily life and in our society in general, everyone wants to have the newest smartphone, the hippest clothes and so on.

However, this also implies that the old stuff is often thrown away even if it is still functional.

Through this behavior, large amounts of resources are wasted on a daily basis.

We have to change our behavior in a way that we value things that are old but still functional.

We have to make used goods be regarded as more valuable and not dodgy.

Therefore, we have to change our value system and beliefs.

Only then will it be possible to sustain lower consumption levels in an effective fashion.

We should also reuse our old stuff.

For example, if you find things that are still working but you do not use them anymore, try to find people who still see value in it.

By doing so, you can save resources and also ensure that resources are used more efficiently.

Moreover, if you do not have people who want to use your old stuff, at least make sure that these old things can be recycled in an effective way.

This implies separating your waste properly.

To protect the environmental system from the adverse effects of mining, states and governments have to install enough nature reserves so that animals and plants are protected from harmful human interventions.

Nature reserves are crucial for animals and plant species to reproduce since they provide and ensure their natural living conditions.

Thus, nature reserves are another measure to mitigate the adverse effects of mining operations.

Education is another crucial measure against mining and its adverse effects on the environmental system.

We have to show people how harmful mining can be to our planet.

This education should start at a quite young age.

By educating school children, they are likely to also convince their parents and so also parents are likely to pay more attention to this issue and act accordingly.

In addition, when these educated children turn into grownups, they are also more likely to adjust their behavior in an environmentally-friendly manner.

The biggest contribution we can make to mitigate the adverse effects related to mining is to reduce our consumption levels.

This topic should be at the core of the education process.

Making your contribution, especially through a reduction in consumption, matters!

However, you can do much more than that.

You should try to convince your family and friends about the adverse consequences of their consumption behavior and how this also translates into the adverse effects caused by mining.

By doing so, you can change not only your own behavior but also contribute to a changed consumption behavior on a large scale.

Mining is an important source to meet the demand for precious metals and other elements that are crucial for our daily life.

However, mining also has severe negative effects on the environmental system, including humans, animals, plants and also aquatic life.

In order to mitigate the adverse effects of mining, it is crucial that we reduce our consumption levels.

Industries only mine on large scale since our consumption levels lead to such high demand.

If we reduce our consumption levels, the incentive for mining will also be reduced since resource prices are likely to drop.

Therefore, if everyone makes his or her contribution, the mining problem can be mitigated in an effective way in order to ensure a livable future for future generations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining

https://niwa.co.nz/our-science/freshwater/tools/kaitiaki_tools/impacts/chemical-contaminates/causes-of-chemical-contamination/chemical-contaminates-and-mining

https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/problems/mining.html

About the author

My name is Andreas and my mission is to educate people of all ages about our environmental problems and how everyone can make a contribution to mitigate these issues.

As I went to university and got my Master’s degree in Economics, I did plenty of research in the field of Development Economics.

After finishing university, I traveled around the world. From this time on, I wanted to make a contribution to ensure a livable future for the next generations in every part of our beautiful planet.

Wanna make a contribution to save our environment? Share it!

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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Environmental Issues — Diamond Mining and the Environment: An Analysis of the Harmful Effects

Diamond Mining and The Environment: an Analysis of The Harmful Effects

• Categories: Environmental Issues

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Published: Sep 5, 2023

Words: 1032 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

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Introduction, environmental impacts of diamond mining, the debate surrounding diamond mining, soil disruption and deforestation, destruction of habitats and biodiversity, water and soil pollution, the economic benefits of diamond mining, the ethical considerations of diamond mining, the potential for sustainable diamond mining practices.

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Essay on Diamond Mining Harmful To The Environment

Students are often asked to write an essay on Diamond Mining Harmful To The Environment in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Diamond Mining Harmful To The Environment

Introduction.

Diamond mining is a process to get diamonds from the earth’s depths. But this process can harm our environment in many ways. The damages are often long-term and hard to fix.

Land Destruction

Diamond mining means digging deep into the earth. This can destroy large areas of land. It can also lead to soil erosion, making the land unfit for plants and animals.

Water Pollution

In diamond mining, lots of water is used. This water, mixed with chemicals, can pollute rivers and lakes. It harms the water animals and plants, and even us when we drink it.

Deforestation

To mine diamonds, trees are often cut down. This leads to deforestation, hurting the homes of many animals. It also increases carbon dioxide in the air, causing climate change.

In conclusion, while diamonds may be beautiful, the process to get them can harm our environment. It’s important to think about these impacts and find ways to mine diamonds responsibly.

250 Words Essay on Diamond Mining Harmful To The Environment

The impact of diamond mining.

Diamond mining is an activity that brings shiny, beautiful jewels to our stores. But, it also causes serious harm to our environment. This damage occurs in different ways and affects many parts of our natural world.

Firstly, diamond mining involves removing large amounts of soil and rock. This activity, known as open-pit mining, creates huge holes in the earth. These holes can be harmful to animals living nearby and can change the shape of the land. It also leads to soil erosion, which can harm plant life.

Secondly, diamond mining can pollute water. Miners use water to separate diamonds from other materials. This water often contains harmful chemicals, which can end up in rivers and lakes. This polluted water can harm fish and other water creatures. It can also make the water unsafe for people to drink.

Lastly, mining uses a lot of energy. This energy often comes from burning fossil fuels, which releases harmful gases into the air. These gases contribute to climate change, a big problem facing our planet.

In conclusion, while diamonds are beautiful and valuable, the process of mining them can harm the environment. It can destroy land, pollute water, and contribute to climate change. It’s important to think about these impacts when we buy diamonds. We should look for ways to mine diamonds that are less harmful to our planet.

500 Words Essay on Diamond Mining Harmful To The Environment

Diamond mining is a process where precious diamonds are taken out from the earth. It seems exciting to think about finding sparkling diamonds. But, it is not as shiny and beautiful for our environment. Diamond mining can cause serious harm to nature.

The first harm caused by diamond mining is land destruction. Mining requires large areas of land to be dug up. This means trees get cut down, habitats get destroyed, and the land can become useless for other things. Animals lose their homes and it can take a long time for the land to recover.

Mining also pollutes water. The mining process uses a lot of water. Often, this water gets contaminated with chemicals used in the mining process. This dirty water can then flow into rivers and lakes, harming the water life and making the water unsafe to drink.

Soil Erosion

Soil erosion is another big problem caused by diamond mining. When the land is dug up for mining, the top layer of soil is removed. This top layer is very important because it is full of nutrients that plants need to grow. Without this top layer, the soil can become barren and it is difficult for plants to grow back.

Energy Consumption and Air Pollution

Diamond mining uses a lot of energy. This energy often comes from burning fossil fuels, which releases harmful gases into the air. These gases can contribute to air pollution and global warming.

Human Rights Issues

While this is not directly an environmental issue, it is still important to mention. Many diamond mines are in poor countries where workers are often treated badly. They may be paid very little and forced to work in dangerous conditions. This is a social problem that is linked to diamond mining.

In conclusion, diamond mining can cause a lot of harm to the environment. It can destroy land, pollute water, cause soil erosion, and contribute to air pollution. It can also lead to human rights issues. It is important to think about these issues when we consider the true cost of diamonds.

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82 Data Mining Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best data mining topic ideas & essay examples, 💡 good essay topics on data mining, ✅ most interesting data mining topics to write about.

• Disadvantages of Using Web 2.0 for Data Mining Applications This data can be confusing to the readers and may not be reliable. Lastly, with the use of Web 2.
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• The Data Mining Method in Healthcare and Education Thus, I would use data mining in both cases; however, before that, I would discover a way to improve the algorithms used for it.
• Data Mining Tools and Data Mining Myths The first problem is correlated with keeping the identity of the person evolved in data mining secret. One of the major myths regarding data mining is that it can replace domain knowledge.
• Hybrid Data Mining Approach in Healthcare One of the healthcare projects that will call for the use of data mining is treatment evaluation. In this case, it is essential to realize that the main aim of health data mining is to […]
• Terrorism and Data Mining Algorithms However, this is a necessary evil as the nation’s security has to be prioritized since these attacks lead to harm to a larger population compared to the infringements.
• Data Mining and Its Major Advantages Thus, it is possible to conclude that data mining is a convenient and effective way of processing information, which has many advantages.
• Transforming Coded and Text Data Before Data Mining However, to complete data mining, it is necessary to transform the data according to the techniques that are to be used in the process.
• Data Mining and Machine Learning Algorithms The shortest distance of string between two instances defines the distance of measure. However, this is also not very clear as to which transformations are summed, and thus it aims to a probability with the […]
• Summary of C4.5 Algorithm: Data Mining 5 algorism: Each record from set of data should be associated with one of the offered classes, it means that one of the attributes of the class should be considered as a class mark.
• Data Mining in Social Networks: Linkedin.com One of the ways to achieve the aim is to understand how users view data mining of their data on LinkedIn.
• Ethnography and Data Mining in Anthropology The study of cultures is of great importance under normal circumstances to enhance the understanding of the same. Data mining is the success secret of ethnography.
• Issues With Data Mining It is necessary to note that the usage of data mining helps FBI to have access to the necessary information for terrorism and crime tracking.
• Large Volume Data Handling: An Efficient Data Mining Solution Data mining is the process of sorting huge amount of data and finding out the relevant data. Data mining is widely used for the maintenance of data which helps a lot to an organization in […]
• Data Mining and Analytical Developments In this era where there is a lot of information to be handled at ago and actually with little available time, it is necessarily useful and wise to analyze data from different viewpoints and summarize […]
• Levi’s Company’s Data Mining & Customer Analytics Levi, the renowned name in jeans is feeling the heat of competition from a number of other brands, which have come upon the scene well after Levi’s but today appear to be approaching Levi’s market […]
• Cryptocurrency Exchange Market Prediction and Analysis Using Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence This paper aims to review the application of A.I.in the context of blockchain finance by examining scholarly articles to determine whether the A.I.algorithm can be used to analyze this financial market.
• Data Mining in Healthcare: Applications and Big Data Analyze Big data analysis is among the most influential modern trends in informatics and it has applications in virtually every sphere of human life.
• “Data Mining and Customer Relationship Marketing in the Banking Industry“ by Chye & Gerry First of all, the article generally elaborates on the notion of customer relationship management, which is defined as “the process of predicting customer behavior and selecting actions to influence that behavior to benefit the company”.
• Data Mining Techniques and Applications The use of data mining to detect disturbances in the ecosystem can help to avert problems that are destructive to the environment and to society.
• Ethical Data Mining in the UAE Traffic Department The research question identified in the assignment two is considered to be the following, namely whether the implementation of the business intelligence into the working process will beneficially influence the work of the Traffic Department […]
• Canadian University Dubai and Data Mining The aim of mining data in the education environment is to enhance the quality of education for the mass through proactive and knowledge-based decision-making approaches.
• Data Mining and Customer Relationship Management As such, CRM not only entails the integration of marketing, sales, customer service, and supply chain capabilities of the firm to attain elevated efficiencies and effectiveness in conveying customer value, but it obliges the organization […]
• E-Commerce: Mining Data for Better Business Intelligence The method allowed the use of Intel and an example to build the study and the literature on data mining for business intelligence to analyze the findings.
• Ethical Implications of Data Mining by Government Institutions Critics of personal data mining insist that it infringes on the rights of an individual and result to the loss of sensitive information.
• Data Mining Role in Companies The increasing adoption of data mining in various sectors illustrates the potential of the technology regarding the analysis of data by entities that seek information crucial to their operations.
• Data Mining: Concepts and Methods Speed of data mining process is important as it has a role to play in the relevance of the data mined. The accuracy of data is also another factor that can be used to measure […]
• Data Mining Technologies According to Han & Kamber, data mining is the process of discovering correlations, patterns, trends or relationships by searching through a large amount of data that in most circumstances is stored in repositories, business databases […]
• Data Mining: A Critical Discussion In recent times, the relatively new discipline of data mining has been a subject of widely published debate in mainstream forums and academic discourses, not only due to the fact that it forms a critical […]
• Commercial Uses of Data Mining Data mining process entails the use of large relational database to identify the correlation that exists in a given data. The principal role of the applications is to sift the data to identify correlations.
• A Discussion on the Acceptability of Data Mining Today, more than ever before, individuals, organizations and governments have access to seemingly endless amounts of data that has been stored electronically on the World Wide Web and the Internet, and thus it makes much […]
• Applying Data Mining Technology for Insurance Rate Making: Automobile Insurance Example
• Applebee’s, Travelocity and Others: Data Mining for Business Decisions
• Applying Data Mining Procedures to a Customer Relationship
• Business Intelligence as Competitive Tool of Data Mining
• Overview of Accounting Information System Data Mining
• Applying Data Mining Technique to Disassembly Sequence Planning
• Approach for Image Data Mining Cultural Studies
• Apriori Algorithm for the Data Mining of Global Cyberspace Security Issues
• Database Data Mining: The Silent Invasion of Privacy
• Data Management: Data Warehousing and Data Mining
• Constructive Data Mining: Modeling Consumers’ Expenditure in Venezuela
• Data Mining and Its Impact on Healthcare
• Innovations and Perspectives in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
• Data Mining and Machine Learning Methods for Cyber Security Intrusion Detection
• Linking Data Mining and Anomaly Detection Techniques
• Data Mining and Pattern Recognition Models for Identifying Inherited Diseases
• Credit Card Fraud Detection Through Data Mining
• Data Mining Approach for Direct Marketing of Banking Products
• Constructive Data Mining: Modeling Argentine Broad Money Demand
• Data Mining-Based Dispatching System for Solving the Pickup and Delivery Problem
• Commercially Available Data Mining Tools Used in the Economic Environment
• Data Mining Climate Variability as an Indicator of U.S. Natural Gas
• Analysis of Data Mining in the Pharmaceutical Industry
• Data Mining-Driven Analysis and Decomposition in Agent Supply Chain Management Networks
• Credit Evaluation Model for Banks Using Data Mining
• Data Mining for Business Intelligence: Multiple Linear Regression
• Cluster Analysis for Diabetic Retinopathy Prediction Using Data Mining Techniques
• Data Mining for Fraud Detection Using Invoicing Data
• Jaeger Uses Data Mining to Reduce Losses From Crime and Waste
• Data Mining for Industrial Engineering and Management
• Business Intelligence and Data Mining – Decision Trees
• Data Mining for Traffic Prediction and Intelligent Traffic Management System
• Building Data Mining Applications for CRM
• Data Mining Optimization Algorithms Based on the Swarm Intelligence
• Big Data Mining: Challenges, Technologies, Tools, and Applications
• Data Mining Solutions for the Business Environment
• Overview of Big Data Mining and Business Intelligence Trends
• Data Mining Techniques for Customer Relationship Management
• Classification-Based Data Mining Approach for Quality Control in Wine Production
• Data Mining With Local Model Specification Uncertainty
• Employing Data Mining Techniques in Testing the Effectiveness of Modernization Theory
• Enhancing Information Management Through Data Mining Analytics
• Evaluating Feature Selection Methods for Learning in Data Mining Applications
• Extracting Formations From Long Financial Time Series Using Data Mining
• Financial and Banking Markets and Data Mining Techniques
• Fraudulent Financial Statements and Detection Through Techniques of Data Mining
• Harmful Impact Internet and Data Mining Have on Society
• Informatics, Data Mining, Econometrics, and Financial Economics: A Connection
• Integrating Data Mining Techniques Into Telemedicine Systems
• Investigating Tobacco Usage Habits Using Data Mining Approach
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The Hidden-Pregnancy Experiment

By Jia Tolentino

Shortly after I became pregnant with my second child, in the fall of 2022, I decided to try a modest experiment. I wanted to see whether I could hide my pregnancy from my phone. After spending my twenties eagerly surveilling and sharing the details of my life online, I had already begun trying to erect some walls of technological privacy: I’d deleted most apps on my phone and turned off camera, location, and microphone access for nearly all of the ones that I did have; I had disabled Siri—I just found it annoying—and I didn’t have any smart devices. For the experiment, I would abide by some additional restrictions. I wouldn’t Google anything about pregnancy nor shop for baby stuff either online or using a credit card, and neither would my husband, because our I.P. addresses—and thus the vast, matrixed fatbergs of personal data assembled by unseen corporations to pinpoint our consumer and political identities—were linked. I wouldn’t look at pregnancy accounts on Instagram or pregnancy forums on Reddit. I wouldn’t update my period tracker or use a pregnancy app.

Nearly every time we load new content on an app or a Web site, ad-exchange companies—Google being the largest among them—broadcast data about our interests, finances, and vulnerabilities to determine exactly what we’ll see; more than a billion of these transactions take place in the U.S. every hour. Each of us, the data-privacy expert Wolfie Christl told me, has “dozens or even hundreds” of digital identifiers attached to our person; there’s an estimated eighteen-billion-dollar industry for location data alone. In August, 2022, Mozilla reviewed twenty pregnancy and period-tracking apps and found that fifteen of them made a “buffet” of personal data available to third parties, including addresses, I.P. numbers, sexual histories, and medical details. In most cases, the apps used vague language about when and how this data could be shared with law enforcement. (A 2020 FOIA lawsuit filed by the A.C.L.U. revealed that the Department of Homeland Security had purchased access to location data for millions of people in order to track them without a warrant. ICE and C.B.P. subsequently said they would stop using such data.) The scholar Shoshana Zuboff has called this surveillance capitalism , “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.” Through our phones, we are under perpetual surveillance by companies that buy and sell data about what kind of person we are, whom we might vote for, what we might purchase, and what we might be nudged into doing.

A decade ago, the sociology professor Janet Vertesi conducted a more rigorous form of the hidden-pregnancy experiment. Using an elaborate system of code words and the anonymous browser Tor, she managed to digitally hide her pregnancy all the way up to the birth of her child. In an article about the experience, for Time , she pointed to a Financial Times report, which found that identifying a single pregnant woman is as valuable to data brokers as knowing the age, gender, and location of more than two hundred nonpregnant people, because of how much stuff new parents tend to buy. She also noted that simply attempting to evade market detection—by, for example, purchasing stacks of gift cards in order to buy a stroller—made her and her husband look as though they were trying to commit fraud.

I wasn’t going to do anything so strict or elaborate. I’d allow myself to text and send e-mails about my pregnancy, and to talk about it with my phone nearby. I assumed that, eventually, it would notice; I’d just wait and see when a diaper ad popped up on Instagram. I liked the idea of establishing a buffer zone between my psyche and the object that most closely monitors it. I found it almost shocking to remember that this was possible.

Pregnancy tends to erode both your freedom and your privacy. Past a certain point in your second trimester, strangers will begin reaching toward your stomach and telling you about the real difference between boys and girls. But I had eluded this during my first pregnancy, because COVID hit before I started showing. In the months that followed, I began to feel the difference between witnessing something and surveilling it, and to recognize that the most pleasurable moments in my life had occurred out of the reach of any oversight. I had felt then an almost psychedelic sense of autonomy; time was dilating, and the slow bloom inside me was beyond anyone’s reach. I wanted to see if I could feel anything like that again.

During pregnancy, and in the early days of parenthood, one is both the object and the conductor of intense surveillance. Last year, the artist and filmmaker Sophie Hamacher co-edited an anthology of writing on the subject, called “ Supervision ,” which was published by M.I.T. Press. “As I became absorbed with tracking and monitoring my child,” Hamacher writes in the preface, “I was increasingly aware that I was a subject of tracking and monitoring by others: advertisers, medical professionals, government entities, people on the street. I began to wonder about the relationship between the way I watched her and the ways we were being watched.” Surveillance encompasses both policing and caretaking, Hamacher notes. In practice, its polarized qualities—“beneficial and harmful, intimate and distanced”—intertwine. Baby monitors use technology developed for the military. Many contemporary models run on CCTV.

Most American households with young children use baby monitors or trackers; two recent surveys put market penetration at seventy-five and eighty-three per cent, respectively. (Both surveys were conducted by companies that make these devices.) And there are now countless other ways that technology will help you to observe and scrutinize your child: nanny-cam Teddy bears, G.P.S. stroller accessories, scales that track your baby’s weight over time, disks that can be affixed to diapers and which will notify you if your baby rolls onto his stomach while he’s asleep. Increasingly, such products use A.I. to detect signs of distress. “The need to know whether a child is safe and well is perfectly natural, which makes the nature of such surveillance appear innocent,” the writer and scholar Hannah Zeavin notes in “Family Scanning,” one of the essays in “Supervision.” But, she adds, “these technologies conceal the possibility of false positives, disrupted emergency services, and of collaboration with state forces—wittingly or unwittingly—all in the name of keeping children safe.” As a general rule, these devices don’t lead to better outcomes for the babies they monitor. More often—like social media, which promises connection as a salve for the loneliness created by social media—parenting tech exacerbates, even calls into existence, the parental anxieties that it pledges to soothe.

This has become a common pattern in contemporary life. Nearly a fifth of U.S. households are estimated to use doorbell cameras, many of them from Ring, the Amazon-owned company that has expanded its reach through police partnerships and a dedicated app that encourages users to post footage of strangers. Ring cameras haven’t made neighborhoods measurably safer, but they have made users measurably more paranoid, and placed more people, sometimes with grave outcomes, in contact with the police. Until recently, police could readily access surveillance footage from the Ring network without a warrant by posting requests on the app. It also gave its own employees and third-party contractors “ ‘ free range ’ access” to view and download videos from users’ homes.

In 2015, the company Owlet started selling a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Smart Sock, which monitored babies’ heart rates and oxygen levels, and alerted parents if these figures were abnormal. Although the company insists that it has made clear that the product is not intended to “treat or diagnose” sudden infant death syndrome—and there is no evidence that it reduces the risk of SIDS occurring—such devices are sometimes referred to as “ SIDS monitors.” But, in 2017, an opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association cautioned physicians against recommending the product. “There are no medical indications for monitoring healthy infants at home,” the authors wrote. The device, they noted, could “stimulate unnecessary fear, uncertainty, and self-doubt in parents about their abilities to keep their infants safe.” The following year, a study in the same journal found “concerning” inaccuracies in oxygen readings. When Owlet went public, in February, 2021, the company had a valuation of more than a billion dollars; later that year, the F.D.A. issued a warning letter that the Smart Sock wasn’t an authorized medical device, and the company pulled it off the market. A million units had already been sold. The following year, Owlet launched a new version, called the Dream Sock, which would receive F.D.A. approval. Most of the reviews for the Dream Sock exude profound gratitude. Parents write about the peace of mind that comes from knowing the baby is being constantly monitored, about not knowing what they would do if the device didn’t exist.

Surveillance capitalism, Zuboff writes, “aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty.” But little is certain when it comes to babies. The control that we feel when we’re engaged in surveillance almost always proves illusory, though the control, or at least the influence, that others exert on us through surveillance is real.

It is not a coincidence that Roe v. Wade, a ruling grounded in the right to privacy, was overturned at a time when privacy in the U.S was on its conceptual deathbed. There are other legal principles that might have served as a stronger foundation for abortion rights: the right to equal protection, or the right to bodily integrity. As Christyne Neff wrote, in 1991, the physical effects of an ordinary pregnancy and delivery resemble those of a severe beating—flesh lacerated, organs rearranged, half a quart of blood lost. Can the state, she asked, rightfully compel a person to undergo this?

Since Roe fell, two years ago, fourteen states have claimed that power in absolute terms, banning abortion almost completely. Two states have successfully passed abortion-vigilante laws, which confer the power of carceral supervision on the public. Indiana’s attorney general has argued that abortion records should be publicly available, like death records; Kansas recently passed a law that would require abortion providers to collect details about the personal lives of their patients and make that information available to the government. Birth control and sex itself may be up next for criminal surveillance: the Heritage Foundation , last year, insisted, on Twitter, that “conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.”

For many women in America, pregnancy was a conduit to state surveillance long before the end of Roe. Poor women, especially poor nonwhite women, are often drug-tested during pregnancy, and sometimes during labor and delivery, without their informed consent. Women who take drugs during pregnancy have been charged with child abuse or neglect, including in cases in which the drugs were legal; women who have miscarried after taking drugs have been charged with manslaughter, even homicide, even when no causal link was proved. Sometimes this happens because the woman in question had responded to billboards and service announcements promising to help pregnant people who are struggling with substance use. In multiple states, women have been taken into custody when the safety of the fetus was called into question. “To be pregnant and poor in the United States is to play a game of roulette with one’s privacy, presumed confidential relationship with medical providers, and basic constitutional and medical rights,” the law professor Michele Goodwin writes in “ Policing the Womb ,” from 2020.

Goodwin describes the case of a woman in Iowa named Christine Taylor, who, in 2010, as a twenty-two-year-old mother of two, was accused of attempted feticide after she fell down the stairs while pregnant. Part of the evidence cited by the police was that she reportedly told a nurse that she hadn’t wanted the baby. (Ultimately, prosecutors decided not to press charges.) The carceral surveillance of pregnancy entails the criminalization of ambivalence, the inspection of these innermost desires. But the deepest truths about motherhood seem to me to be rooted in conflicting, coexisting emotions: nightmare and rapture in the same moment during labor, the love and despair that box each other at night in the weeks that follow, the joy of cuddling my nine-month-old undergirded by the horror of knowing that other babies are starving and dying in rubble. Before I had my first child, I had badly wanted to get pregnant. I had planned for it, prepared for it, hoped for it. Still, when I saw the positive test result, I cried.

My modest experiment went surprisingly smoothly. Because I’d had my first child not long before, this time I didn’t need to buy anything, and I didn’t want to learn anything. I smooth-brained my way to three months, four months, five; no diaper ads. I called up a lawyer and data-privacy specialist named Dominique Shelton Leipzig to get her perspective. Globally, she told me, we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes—that’s eighteen zeroes—of data per day. “The short answer is, you probably haven’t hidden what you think you have,” she said. I told her about the rules I’d set for myself, that I didn’t have many apps and had bought nothing but prenatal vitamins, and that Instagram did not appear to have identified me as pregnant. She paused. “I’m amazed,” she told me. “If you didn’t see any ads, I think you might have succeeded.” I congratulated myself by instantly dropping the experiment and buying maternity pants; ads for baby carriers popped up on my Instagram within minutes.

I had felt little satisfaction hiding from the ad trackers—if anything, I’d only become more conscious of how much surveillance I was engaged in, as both subject and object, and how much more insidious the problem was becoming. We rarely have a clear understanding of what we’re doing when we engage in surveillance of ourselves or others. Life360, an app that’s used by more than sixty million people and is marketed as an easy way to track your child’s location via their smartphone, was found in 2021 to be selling raw location information to data brokers. (The company said it now sells only aggregate data.) In a Pew survey from 2023, seventy-seven per cent of Americans said they had very little to no trust in how social-media executives handle user data, and seventy-one per cent were concerned about how the government uses it. In another survey, ninety-three per cent of Americans said they wouldn’t buy a doorbell camera if it sold data about their family. People just want to be safer. I had wanted security, too, and affirmation—and I had wanted to be a writer. I had disclosed so much of my life to people I’ll never know.

My husband and I had not bought a baby monitor for our first child, a choice that satisfied his desire to not buy things and my desire to insist that certain aspects of experience are fundamentally ungovernable. But shortly after the second child was born she developed eczema, and started scratching her sweet, enormous cheeks in her sleep. One morning, my husband went to her and found that she’d clawed her face open, leaving blood smudged all over her sleep sack and smeared all over her face. “We need a video monitor!” I wailed, already Googling options. “We need to buy a video monitor today.”

We didn’t buy one, but for weeks I regretted it and second-guessed myself. And I surveilled the baby with technology in other ways all the time. In the early weeks, I relied on an app to tell me how much milk she’d drunk and how many soiled diapers she’d had that day—activities that I myself had witnessed just hours before. I felt like a Biblical angel with a thousand eyes, somehow unable to see anything. I took pictures because I knew I would have no memory of the precise contours of this exact baby in a month. When she didn’t seem hungry enough, I panicked, obsessing over every feed.

“What’s the line between pathological self-surveillance and care for a newborn? Is there one?” Sarah Blackwood, an English professor at Pace University, asks, in “Supervision.” Blackwood contrasts the “fantasy of efficiency and sterility” built into parenting tech with the “psychic state of watchfulness so many mothers find themselves in”—a state that is “metastatic, fecund, beyond.” One afternoon, my husband took the baby from me: she was sobbing, and I was incoherently frantic, trying to get her to eat. She was O.K., he told me; she’d eat when she needed to. But I know what’s good for her, and it’s my job to make her do it, I thought, furious. Around the fringes of my consciousness, I felt a flicker of understanding about how this idea that everything was controllable had become so ubiquitous, how we had confused coercion with care. ♦

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Everything Is a Journey Now

Changing our hair, getting divorced, taking spa vacations — they’re not just things we do; they’re “journeys.” The quest for better health is the greatest journey of all.

By Lisa Miller

Drew Barrymore has been talking with Gayle King about her perimenopause “journey ,” and the soccer phenom Carli Lloyd has just divulged her fertility “journey .” By sharing her breast cancer story, Olivia Munn has said she hopes she will “help others find comfort, inspiration, and support on their own journey.” A recent interview with Anne Hathaway has been posted on Instagram with a headline highlighting her “ sobriety journey ,” and Kelly Clarkson has opened up about what Women’s Health calls her “ weight loss journey .” On TikTok, a zillion influencer-guides lead pilgrims on journeys through such ephemeral realms as faith, healing, grief, friendship, mastectomy, and therapy — often selling courses, supplements or eating plans as if they were talismans to help safeguard their path.

“Journey” has decisively taken its place in American speech. The word holds an upbeat utility these days, signaling struggle without darkness or detail, and expressing — in the broadest possible way — an individual’s experience of travails over time.

It’s often related to physical or mental health, but it can really be about anything: “Putting on your socks can be a journey of self-discovery,” said Beth Patton, who lives in Central Indiana and has relapsing polychondritis, an inflammatory disorder. In the chronic disease community, she said, “journey” is a debated word. “It’s a way to romanticize ordinary or unpleasant experiences, like, ‘Oh, this is something special and magical.’” Not everyone appreciates this, she said.

According to the linguistics professor Jesse Egbert at Northern Arizona University, the use of “journey” (the noun) has nearly doubled in American English since 1990, with the most frequent instances occurring online. Mining a new database of conversational American English he and colleagues are building, Egbert could show exactly how colloquial “journey” has become: One woman in Pennsylvania described her “journey to become a morning person,” while another, in Massachusetts, said she was “on a journey of trying to like fish.”

Egbert was able to further demonstrate how the word itself has undergone a transformative journey — what linguists call “semantic drift.” It wasn’t so long ago that Americans mostly used “journey” to mean a literal trip, whereas now it’s more popular as a metaphor. Egbert demonstrated this by searching the more than one billion words in a database called COCA for the nouns people put before “journey” to clarify what sort they’re on. Between 1990 and 2005, the most common modifier was “return,” followed by words like “ocean,” “train,” “mile,” “night,” “overland,” and “bus.”

But between 2006 and 2019, usage shifted. “Return” remains the most common noun modifier to journey, but now it’s followed closely by “faith,” “cancer,” and “life.” Among the top 25 nouns used to modify “journey” today are: “soul,” “adoption,” and “hair.”

In almost every language, “journey” has become a way to talk abstractly about outcomes, for good reason: According to what linguists call the “primary metaphor theory,” humans learn as babies crawling toward their toys that “‘purpose’ and ‘destination’ coincide,” said Elena Semino, a linguist at Lancaster University who specializes in metaphor. As we become able to accomplish our goals while sitting still (standardized tests! working from home!), ambition and travel diverge. Yet we continue to envision achievement as a matter of forward progress. This is why we say, “‘I know what I want, but I don’t know how to get there,’” Semino explained. “Or ‘I’m at a crossroads.’”

So it’s not surprising, perhaps, that as Americans started seeing good health as a desirable goal, achievable through their own actions and choices — and marketers encouraged these pursuits and commodified them — the words “journey” and “health” became inextricably linked. In 1898, C.W. Post wrote a pamphlet he called “The Road to Wellville,” which he attached to each box of his new product, Grape-Nuts. In 1926, the Postum Cereal Company republished the pamphlet as a small book , now with the subtitle, “A Personally Conducted Journey to the Land of Good Health by the Route of Right Living.”

The language (and business) of self-help so completely saturates culture, “it gets kind of hard to trace where a word started and where it came from,” said Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, author of “Promise Land: My Journey Through America’s Self-Help Culture.” Americans like to put an optimistic, brave spin on suffering, and “journey” seeped in because, Lamb-Shapiro speculated, it’s bland enough to “tackle really difficult things,” yet positive enough to “make them palatable and tolerable.”

“Journey” had fully entered medical speak by the 2010s. Many cancer patients recoiled from the “battle” language traditionally used by doctors, as well as by friends and relatives. In “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag had noted back in 1978 that “every physician and every attentive patient is familiar with, if perhaps inured to, this military terminology.” But now, opposition to the notion of disease as an enemy combatant reached a crescendo. To reflexively call an experience of cancer a battle created “winners” and “losers,” where death or long suffering represented a failure — of will, strength, determination, diet, behavior, or outlook — on the part of the patient.

Many patients “detest” the military metaphor, Robert Miller conceded in Oncology Times in 2010. Knowing this, Miller, then a breast cancer oncologist affiliated with Johns Hopkins, said he struggled to find the right words in composing a condolence note to a patient’s spouse. “I welcome suggestions,” he wrote.

“Journey” seemed less judgmental, more neutral. In Britain, the National Health Service had started to almost exclusively use “journey” language in reference to cancer (treatments were “pathways”). Semino, the metaphor expert whose father had died of cancer at a time when patients’ diagnoses were hidden from them, wanted to examine how patients talked about it — and whether that language caused them harm. In a research paper Semino published with colleagues in 2015, she looked at how patients talked about their cancer on forums online and found that they still used “battle” as often as they did “journey,” and that “journey” could be disempowering, as well.

For some people, talking about cancer as a “journey” gave them a sense of control and camaraderie — buddies traveling the same path — but others used the term to convey their exhaustion. Having cancer “is like trying to drive a coach and horses uphill with no back wheels on the coach,” one man wrote. Patients used “journey” to describe just how passive they felt or how reluctant to bear the burden of their disease. Separately, patients have told Semino how much they hate the word “journey,” saying it trivializes their experience, that it’s clichéd.

But it was too late: The metaphor already was everywhere. In 2014, Anna Wintour was asked which word she would like to banish from the fashion lexicon and she said, “journey.” The following year, Yolanda Foster, the mother of Gigi and Bella Hadid, told People magazine that while she was on her Lyme disease journey, two of her children were afflicted, too. Medical journals and government publications began describing insomnia , the effort to achieve health-care reform , diabetes , and the development of RSV vaccines as a journey. The term “healing journey,” in use since at least the mid-2010s, blew up around 2021. The phrase in news media referenced the experience of cancer , celebrity weight loss , trafficking of Indigenous children , Sean Combs’s creative process , spa vacations , amputation , and better sex .

On the Reddit channel Chronic Illness, one poster eloquently fumed that persistent sickness is not a journey. “It’s endless, pointless and repetitive. There’s no new ground to gain here.” The cultural insistence on illness as a journey, from which a traveler can learn useful, or even life-changing lessons, becomes something to “disassociate from, survive, endure.” It “causes social isolation.”

Although she concedes its downsides, Stephanie Swanson likes to think of herself as on a journey. Swanson, who is 37 and lives in Kansas City, was an engineer by training, with three young children, a career and a sideline as an aerialist, when she got long Covid in the summer of 2022. The things that had made her successful — her physical stamina, her ability to solve problems — evaporated. “I’ve had to give up my career, my hobbies, my physical abilities,” she said. “I’ve gained 30 pounds on my tiny dancer body. I’m doing the best I can with what I have.”

Swanson makes a distinction between “journey” and “trip”: The latter is circumscribed by a start, an end, and hotel and restaurant reservations along the way. She sees “journey” as a way to capture the arc of a whole life.

When she was running operations at a medical center at the University of Kansas, she always imagined slowing down to enjoy her kids more or to read a book, but “I felt like my head was going to explode.” Now Swanson has become a person who must rent a wheelchair for her upcoming trip to New York City, and she likes how “journey” accommodates all the challenging, unexpected circumstances she confronts. “To me, the word ‘journey’ resonates with choosing to be on a path of acceptance but not standing still,” she said. “I’m not giving up, but recognizing that this is the path I’m on.”

Ramani Durvasula uses ”journey” advisedly. A clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who treats women in emotionally abusive relationships, she recognizes how “journey” has been “eye-rollingly cheapened” and has started to experiment with alternatives. She’s tried “process.” She’s tried “healing trajectory.” But she falls back on journey, because it, more than any other word, expresses the step-by-step, sometimes circular or backward nature of enduring something hard. “Arguably, a journey doesn’t have a destination,” she said. “Have you ever taken a hike in a loop? And you end up exactly where you parked your car?”

But Durvasula does object to the easy-breezy healing so many journey hashtags promote, what she calls the “post-sobriety, post-weight-loss, now-I’m-in-love-again-after-my-toxic-relationship” reels. Too many TikToks show the crying in the car then the cute party dress, skipping over the middle, when people feel ugly, angry, self-loathing, and hopeless. “I want to see the hell,” she said. “I want to see the nightmare.”

When in 2020 a Swedish linguist named Charlotte Hommerberg studied how advanced cancer patients describe their experience, she found they used “battle” and “journey,” like everyone else. But most also used a third metaphor that conveyed not progress, fight or hope. They said cancer was like “imprisonment,” a feeling of being stuck — like a “free bird in a cage,” one person wrote. Powerless and going nowhere.

Coping With Grief and Loss

Living through the loss of a loved one is a universal experience. but the ways in which we experience and deal with the pain can largely differ..

What Experts Say:   Psychotherapists say that grief is not a problem to be solved , but a process to be lived through, in whatever form it may take.

How to Help: Experiencing a sudden loss can be particularly traumatic. Here are some ways to offer your support to someone grieving.

A New Diagnosis: Prolonged grief disorder, a new entry in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, applies to those who continue to struggle long after a loss .

The Biology of Grief: Grief isn’t only a psychological experience. It can affect the body too, but much about the effects remains a mystery .

Comforting Memories:  After a person dies, their digital scraps — text messages, emails, playlists and voicemails — are left behind. They can offer solace to their grieving families .

Grieving the Loss of a Pet:   Counseling. Grief-group sessions. The number of resources for coping with a pet’s death  has grown in recent years.