of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change has lent urgency to the practical impacts of government actions for mining and other EI companies. Areas of Particular Vulnerability. Governments may wish to protect certain terrestrial or marine areas of physical beauty or uniqueness, for maintenance of biodiversity, for protection of game, or for cultural heritage. Mining activities may be prohibited or permitted in these protected areas subject to rules and conditions. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) defines a protected area as “a clearly defined geographical space, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the longterm conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values.”26 It can include a national park or wilderness area, a community conserved area, or nature reserves. There are also areas of high conservation value that do not yet have protected status but which may nonetheless be worthy of it. UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites are a starting point for designating areas in which mining would not be allowed. They are globally significant and must be left inviolate. The International Council on Mines and Minerals (ICMM) has agreed that such areas should be sacrosanct and encourages its members not to mine in them. In Africa, for example, mineral operations in equatorial forest areas (rich in biodiversity) have been particularly controversial. It has been estimated that the global network of protected areas stores at least 15 percent of terrestrial carbon.27 ASM is a particular problem for such areas, since it frequently encroaches into remote, pristine, protected areas, as the ASM–Protected Areas and Critical Ecosystems (PACE) program revealed (see box 9.4). A source of tension can arise between the short-term needs of governmental authorities and the influence of mining companies, on the one hand, and legitimate environmental concerns, on the other. This is a “charged context for decision making” (International Study Group 2011, 52). Social impacts
Social impacts from the EIs vary according to the life cycle of the project. They can be positive as well as negative— positives can include job creation, education and skills development, fostering of urban and trade centers, and investment in the improvement of local infrastructure and services. The challenge is to ensure that these positive impacts are sustainable.
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OIL, GAS, AND MINING
Box 9.4 Work of ASM-PACE Project: Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (ASM)—Protected Areas and Critical Ecosystems (PACE) ASM-PACE began as a partnership between Estelle Levin Limited and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to address the environmental impacts of ASM in some of the world’s most important ecosystems. Active since 2010, the program is focused, as its name says, exclusively on addressing the impacts of ASM in protected areas and critical ecosystems. ASM occurs in or impacts a wide range of critical ecosystems, including arctic landscapes (for example, Greenland), tropical rainforests (Brazil and Gabon), and coral reefs (the Philippines). It is practiced in approximately 80 countries and in 32 of 36 countries ASMPACE has studied—and in or around 96 of 147 of the protected areas in those 36 countries. Affected sites include at least 7 natural World Heritage Sites and at least 12 WWF Priority Landscapes.
Some issues are common to oil, gas, and mining projects: community relations, rights of indigenous peoples, the acquisition of land and resettlement, human rights abuses, and community dependency, among others. Those social impacts that are more usually associated either with oil and gas or mining are addressed separately in the sections that follow. The impacts of each can differ. For example, the financial flows from royalties and taxes will be orders of magnitude greater in oil and gas than in mining, and the physical footprint from oil and gas extraction will usually be less than for solid mineral extraction, even though oil or gas infrastructure and processing plants take up land space. The impact of pipeline networks will be more linear in impact than with any comparable mining structures. The impact on employment will be less in oil and gas than in mining. Common issues Community Relations. Given the high impact of extractives projects on the surrounding area, there have been instances when relations between investors and governments with local communities have been fraught with tension. Without a so-called social license to operate, or the free and informed consent of the communities concerned, the risk is that the project will become hard and even impossible to run. Oil operations in the Niger Delta are an infamous example of
