Environmental harm from mining emissions is estimated to be worth £2.5 trillion annually

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Environmental harm from mining emissions is estimated to be worth £2.5 trillion annually

according to a new study, greenhouse gas emissions From global mining and resource exploitation cause up to £2.5 trillion ($3 trillion) in damages annually. The world relies on extractive industries to supply it with fossil fuels, metal ores, and mineral resources, but new research found that these businesses have annual environmental costs of up to £4 trillion ($5 trillion). Most of them are a result of acidification, greenhouse gases, and particle pollution, especially from the steel and coal industries.

Mineral resources have been referred to as one of Earth's "great endowments" and as playing a "dominant role" in the economies of numerous nations by UN secretary-general António Guterres. In fact, the analysis shows that, for the majority of nations, the mining industry generates more economic advantages than losses.

It also comes to the conclusion that for some weaker nations, such as Afghanistan, Gabon, and Madagascar, the environmental costs may outweigh the economic benefits. This is consistent with the "resource curse," which refers to connections between mineral extraction and unfavorable outcomes, including inequality and environmental degradation.

The authors claim that the data demonstrate the advantages of switching to cleaner energy sources since the extraction of fossil fuels accounts for approximately half of the environmental costs, not including the combustion of the fuels they produce.

Calculating Costs

While the extraction of natural resources can benefit economies and create jobs, it can also have a negative impact on the environment, biodiversity, and human health. The study team makes an estimate of the proportion between these expenses and the economic benefits that these industries bring. In order to do this, they used datasets from the US and British geological surveys to analyze the global output of 38 basic materials, including coal, iron, and natural gas.

The life-cycle assessment (LCA) was carried out by the researchers utilizing a "cradle-to-gate" methodology. This evaluates the environmental effects of all stages of a product's life, excluding usage, including greenhouse gas emissions, particulate matter emissions, acidification, land-use change, resource depletion, and toxicity.

Because fossil fuel burning is excluded, the article claims that it is possible to analyze costs and benefits from the perspective of the countries that extract the resources.

The study focuses on how these activities affect people's health, including the respiratory illnesses and skin conditions that miners experience as well as the decline in biodiversity brought on by habitat loss and degradation.

In order to generate data that could be compared with other economic indicators, the LCA results were later "monetized." This entails converting indices like mortality, environmental harm, and extinction of species into monetary values. The researchers employed a "high" and a "low" monetization factor for each individual endpoint in order to emphasize the uncertainty surrounding monetization. According to the study's lead author Rosalie Valeska Arendt of the Technical University of Berlin, "For the high estimate, we added future effort expenditures. These expenses arise because it takes more effort and energy to extract materials due to the declining concentration of ore and material resources. If future effort costs are included, they dominate all other expenses, and the influence of fossil energy carriers becomes even more evident. For the low estimate, these costs are not included because mining costs have traditionally dropped despite declining ore grades.

One of the study's biggest surprises is how the research team matched the estimated environmental costs of various nations to their GDP and employment levels. With the exception of several African nations, where the expenses were smaller, the damages for the majority of countries surpassed £420 ($500) per employed person.

The scientists aimed to demonstrate the disparity between local and global mining costs. The study fails not to take into account the "transboundary consequences of air, soil, and water pollution" since they "assumed all impacts to be local impacts aside from global warming," according to the paper.

Resources are Cursed

It was concluded that the global environmental costs associated with the extraction industries average £0.3 trillion ($0.4 trillion) year, or 0.5% of the global GDP of £71 trillion ($85 trillion) annually.

This sum increases to £4 trillion ($5 trillion) annually when future effort costs are considered, or 6.4 percent of world GDP. According to the study, between £0.3 trillion ($0.3 trillion) and £3 trillion ($3 trillion) of all these expenses are attributable to climate change, which is mostly caused by greenhouse gases associated with extraction.

The extraction of resources "contributes most to environmental damage" in terms of climate change, according to the research, with iron (23 percent), coal (18 percent), magnesium (13 percent), crude oil (10 percent), aluminum (8 percent), and manganese (7 percent).

Overall, ecosystem damage accounts for 43% of expenses, while effects on human

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Mass share of materials (left, A) – aluminium, methane, coal, chromium, crude oil, copper, iron, graphite, lignite, magnesium (top down); Cost share of materials (middle, B) – silver, aluminium, gold, methane, coal, chromium, crude oil, copper, iron, graphite, magnesium, manganese, nickel, zinc (top down); Share of impacts (right, C) prices in euro, low estimate. Source: Arendt et al (2022).

health account for 21% of total costs. Fossil fuels account for 43% of all costs and are a material group that contributes disproportionately to environmental harm. The most expensive fuel was oil, followed by natural gas and coal.

Despite the fact that the environmental costs associated with the clean energy transition have received considerable attention, Valeska Arendt tells Carbon Brief that when it comes to total environmental costs today, the effects of steel, aluminum, and fossil fuel transporters still dominate.

The graph above illustrate each material's production volume (on the left), the distribution of damages for each material (in the middle), and the "low" cost estimate for damage expenses (on the right).

Gains vs. Losses

The analysis comes to a conclusion that generally speaking, mining is more economically advantageous for the majority of countries when expenses for individual countries are calculated without taking into account losses caused by the global climate.

The countries with the highest environmental expenses—China, Brazil, India, and Russia—all see greater advantages from their mining operations than costs. When the costs of climate change are factored into the high "global" estimate, however, 20 countries' GDP losses exceed their gains from mining operations. According to the research, these nations, which are concentrated in Africa, Central, and South America, and south-east Asia, are "severely impacted by climate change." For the low estimate, only a few nations— Rwanda, Gabon, Madagascar, and Afghanistan—have environmental costs that outweigh economic benefits.

The low estimate, the double logarithmic scale of GDP gain versus domestic costs on the left and damage costs on the right. From Arendt and others (2022). As per a study published in Nature Climate Change under the direction of Prof. Katharine Ricke, the costs of climate change are distributed globally.

"If climate change costs are added to domestic costs, more countries have a negative cost-benefit ratio (their total environmental costs exceed their GDP contribution for mining and processing), but these costs of climate change are not borne by the extracting countries themselves," Valeska Arendt tells Carbon Brief.

According to the report, the nations that process materials—like those that manufacture steel in Germany and Japan—as

Estimate

Aluminum, methane, coal, chromium, crude oil, copper, iron, graphite, lignite, and magnesium make up the majority of materials (left, A); silver, aluminum, gold, methane, coal, chromium, crude oil, copper, iron, graphite, magnesium, manganese, nickel, and zinc cost share (middle, B); Impacts share (right, C), low estimate; prices in euros. From Arendt and others (2022).

well as those that produce oil—like Algeria, Azerbaijan, and Nigeria—benefit the most economically. This is because, according to the research, they "primarily externalise environmental costs of upstream and downstream activities," which means that society as a whole is responsible for paying such costs.

According to the study, China is the country with the biggest emissions of greenhouse gases due to its operations, particularly its production of iron, steel, coal, magnesium, and aluminum. However, given that China's production of magnesium is "actually quite low," Dr. Daniel Smith of the University of Leicester, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that he is quite surprised by this.

According to the study, manganese mining and production in South Africa are the second biggest contributors, followed by natural gas extraction in the US and Russia.

Future Investigation

The absence of sufficient data for a thorough analysis is cited by the authors as the study's primary drawback. The paper is simply a global estimate, and as Valeska Arendt explains to Carbon Brief, "I hope that we can enhance this analysis in more depth in the future."

The life-cycle assessment databases "did not give enough process steps in between mining and processing," the author continues, "thus we were not able to discriminate between the mining and processing of all minerals."

However, she continues, "Future study could focus more narrowly on a single element identified as relevant."

Dr. Simon Jowitt, a geologist at the University of Nevada who was not engaged in the study, brings up a different problem. According to him, it is "a little inaccurate" to compare the environmental expenses to the portion of GDP that mining contributes to.

He gives the example of Germany's mined resources, which have a high value yet only make up 0.5% of the country's GDP. These resources "could be considerably more than countries we would consider mining-dominated, such the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Mexico, and so on," according to one expert. According to Jowitt, a sizable amount of mining in Germany will be coal, which is "environmentally problematic," but because of the higher GDP of the German economy as a whole, "taking the contribution of mining to GDP as a value leads [the environmental damages] to be artificially reduced."

The authors concede that not all environmental effects are covered in their research; for instance, they do not discuss the harm done to freshwater and marine species.

"[There is] no recognition of the numerous other potential impacts associated with mining either," continues Dr. Gavin Mudd, a mining researcher at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology who was not involved in the study. "Especially water pollution, water depletion, acid rain, and particulate pollution associated with smelters."

However, the authors contend in their study that their analysis offers "several insightful perspectives into the environmental implications of mining and processing worldwide." They add, "We found which countries profit from the continuing of local mining activities, from a cost-benefit viewpoint, which is valuable if a game-theoretical examination of fading out the extraction of fossil resources is sought after.

The approach that was created can be utilized to analyze other large-scale changes in evolving resource extraction patterns, the authors further state.