Editor’s note: Fossil fuels are highly polluting, their extraction is linked to human rights abuses, and their continued use is killing the planet. However, renewable energy technologies also have massive unrecognized costs. Our conclusion is that resistance to both of these industries is a moral imperative.
In this article we highlight two scientific studies examining these harms. It is critical that we act proactively to defend threatened land before development plans are cemented and it becomes too late.
Researchers have warned that mining threats to biodiversity caused by renewable energy production could surpass those averted by climate change mitigation.
A University of Queensland study found protected areas, key biodiversity areas and the world’s remaining wilderness would be under growing pressure from mining the minerals required for a clean energy transition.
UQ’s Dr. Laura Sonter said renewable energy production was material-intensive—much more so than fossil fuels—and mining these materials would increase as fossil fuels were phased out.
“Our study shows that mining the materials needed for renewable energy such as lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel and aluminum will create further pressure on the biodiversity located in mineral-rich landscapes,” Dr. Sonter said.
The research team mapped the world’s mining areas, according to an extensive database of 62,381 pre-operational, operational and closed mining properties, targeting 40 different commodities.
They found that areas with potential mining activity covered 50 million square kilometers of the planet—35 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface excluding Antarctica—and many of these areas coincided with places critical for biodiversity conservation.
“Almost 10 percent of all mining areas occur within currently protected sites, with plenty of other mining occurring within or nearby sites deemed a priority for future conservation of many species,” Dr. Sonter said.
“In terms of mining areas targeting materials needed specifically for renewable energy production, the story is not much better. We found that 82 percent of mining areas target materials needed for renewable energy production, of which, 12 percent coincide with protected areas, 7 percent with key biodiversity areas and 14 percent with wilderness. And, of the mining areas that overlapped protected areas and wilderness, those that targeted materials for renewable energy contained a greater density of mines than the mining areas that targeted other materials.”
Professor James Watson, from UQ’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Science and the Wildlife Conservation Society, said the impacts of a green energy future on biodiversity were not considered in international climate policies.
“New mining threats aren’t seriously addressed in current global discussions about the post-2020 United Nation’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity,” Professor Watson said.
The research team said careful strategic planning was urgently needed.
“Mining threats to biodiversity will increase as more mines target materials for renewable energy production,” Dr. Sonter said.
“Combine this risk with the extensive spatial footprint of renewable energy infrastructure, and the risks become even more concerning.”
More information
Laura J. Sonter et al. Renewable energy production will exacerbate mining threats to biodiversity, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17928-5
A University of Queensland study found protected areas, key biodiversity areas and the world’s remaining wilderness would be under growing pressure from mining the minerals required for a clean energy transition.
UQ’s Dr. Laura Sonter said renewable energy production was material-intensive—much more so than fossil fuels—and mining these materials would increase as fossil fuels were phased out.
“Our study shows that mining the materials needed for renewable energy such as lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel and aluminum will create further pressure on the biodiversity located in mineral-rich landscapes,” Dr. Sonter said.
The research team mapped the world’s mining areas, according to an extensive database of 62,381 pre-operational, operational and closed mining properties, targeting 40 different commodities.
They found that areas with potential mining activity covered 50 million square kilometers of the planet—35 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface excluding Antarctica—and many of these areas coincided with places critical for biodiversity conservation.
“Almost 10 percent of all mining areas occur within currently protected sites, with plenty of other mining occurring within or nearby sites deemed a priority for future conservation of many species,” Dr. Sonter said.
“In terms of mining areas targeting materials needed specifically for renewable energy production, the story is not much better. We found that 82 percent of mining areas target materials needed for renewable energy production, of which, 12 percent coincide with protected areas, 7 percent with key biodiversity areas and 14 percent with wilderness. And, of the mining areas that overlapped protected areas and wilderness, those that targeted materials for renewable energy contained a greater density of mines than the mining areas that targeted other materials.”
Professor James Watson, from UQ’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Science and the Wildlife Conservation Society, said the impacts of a green energy future on biodiversity were not considered in international climate policies.
“New mining threats aren’t seriously addressed in current global discussions about the post-2020 United Nation’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity,” Professor Watson said.
The research team said careful strategic planning was urgently needed.
“Mining threats to biodiversity will increase as more mines target materials for renewable energy production,” Dr. Sonter said.
“Combine this risk with the extensive spatial footprint of renewable energy infrastructure, and the risks become even more concerning.”
The research is published in Nature Communications.
More information: Laura J. Sonter et al. Renewable energy production will exacerbate mining threats to biodiversity, Nature Communications(2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17928-5
A World at Risk: Aggregating Development Trends to Forecast Global Habitat Conversion
Abstract
A growing and more affluent human population is expected to increase the demand for resources and to accelerate habitat modification, but by how much and where remains unknown. Here we project and aggregate global spatial patterns of expected urban and agricultural expansion, conventional and unconventional oil and gas, coal, solar, wind, biofuels and mining development. Cumulatively, these threats place at risk 20% of the remaining global natural lands (19.68 million km2) and could result in half of the world’s biomes becoming >50% converted while doubling and tripling the extent of land converted in South America and Africa, respectively. Regionally, substantial shifts in land conversion could occur in Southern and Western South America, Central and Eastern Africa, and the Central Rocky Mountains of North America. With only 5% of the Earth’s at-risk natural lands under strict legal protection, estimating and proactively mitigating multi-sector development risk is critical for curtailing the further substantial loss of nature.
More information
Oakleaf JR, Kennedy CM, Baruch-Mordo S, West PC, Gerber JS, Jarvis L, et al. (2015) A World at Risk: Aggregating Development Trends to Forecast Global Habitat Conversion. PLoS ONE 10(10): e0138334. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0138334
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My grandparents (born 1882-1894) all grew up in homes that were off the grid — for the simple reason that until 1925, most of America was off the grid. This was also true for most of the childhood of my parents (born 1916-1918).
The remarkable thing is that none of them complained about it, because none of them knew that they were missing anything. “Off the grid” wasn’t even a meaningful term back then — because “the grid” was not the norm.
It was a time of candles, oil lamps, and fireplaces. Food was cooked over wood-burning stoves, where water was also heated for bathing.
When it was time for ironing, irons were heated in the oven. (Irons, wrapped in blankets, were also used for heating the foot of the bed overnight.)
Even for me (growing up in the 1950s), it was the norm to wake up in a cold house in the morning, light the gas heaters, and stand in front of them for awhile to warm up — much as you might use a campfire, when camping.
Indoor plumbing was even a novelty for my grandparents. As recently as the late 1950s, my maternal grandmother didn’t have a water heater — and she lived in the middle of a city of 60,000 people. And it wasn’t that she couldn’t afford it. It simply hadn’t occurred to her that hot running water was a “necessity of life.” (It may be partly due to this history that I have lived without hot water for the last 30 years, which I’ve spent in a fiberglass sailboat, off San Francisco Bay.)
That same grandmother (who died at the age of 78, in 1962) never learned to drive, never boarded a plane, and spend her entire life in the state of Texas.
To her perception, however, she had traveled widely. Born on a farm, east of Dallas, she grew up in a town of 3000, south of Dallas, and spent her adult life in the cities of Galveston, Dallas, and San Angelo.
Again, this was not the life of deprived people, or of hermits. We’re talking about typical, urban American lives, within the last century.
I have even visited the home (built in 1824) of a sixth-generation ancestor, when no one had any of the novelties of electricity or self-propelled vehicles — simply because they hadn’t been invented yet, or were only experimental.
But, again, no one complained about the absence of cars, elevators, hot water, faucets, flush toilets, radio, TV, or air conditioning — because none of those things had become common conveniences. And yet, those ancestors of the 1830s grew up in what was, for them, “modern America.”
Admittedly, it was also a modern America with a high rate of infant mortality, and of women dying in childbirth. For much of America, it was also a time of slavery, of the violent suppression of Native Americans, the theft of their land, and the destruction of the natural world that had sustained them, for thousands of years.
That 1824 home was the residence of a wealthy landowner. Built by slaves and workmen with hand tools, the front door was cross-braced with heavy beams, to deter Indian attacks. A part of the basement was also used to house newly acquired slaves, who were confined there for a week like pet dogs or cats, so that they would learn that it was “home,” and not to run away.
I stood in the footprints of slaves, and saw where one of them had carved six notches into the door frame in front of me — marking the week he spent in dungeon-like confinement, before being released to the relative freedom of slave-quarters, where he was “free” to come and go — as the master permitted.
That master’s daughter, in western North Carolina, would grow up to marry a prominent abolitionist, who built a hotel, which is now the county museum — a hotel where visitors were given candles before nightfall, and had to order hot baths, a half day in advance.
Three generations later, in the 1880s, my grandfather (and their great-grandson) was one of nine siblings, six of whom died of disease in childhood. And all of this, sadly, was also the norm.
Most of them lived and died in a world without electricity or internal combustion engines, where half of the childeen never grew up. And yet few complaints were recorded, because that was the world that was.
If future generations survive OUR modern world (a highly debatable premise), their historians no doubt will marvel at how we survived a world of nuclear weapons, carbon fuels, petrochemicals, plastics, the systematic pollution of air, land, and water, and where parents were routinely “congratulated” for having children — though it was in their ancestors’ generations that world population had grown from 700 million to more than seven billion, in litle more than two centuries.
The readers of those future histories (if any) no doubt will look back in wonder at previous generations — at OUR generations — and ask, “What were they thinking?”
What the hell were they thinking?
Thank you for sharing this, Mark. I enjoyed reading it. Hopefully, there will be some small-scale, surviving eco-communities, after the end of civilization, in which it will become the new normal to deeply question any proposed technological idea and contemplate all of its potential impacts to all species before allowing that technology to be implemented.