For protected areas, particularly with respect to the natural environment, an initial response is to designate such areas according to an internationally accepted scheme such as that laid down by the IUCN. The IUCN protection area management categories are an attempt to classify protected areas according to their management objectives (IUCN 2013). They are recognized by international bodies such as the United Nations and by many national governments as the global standard for defining and recording protected areas. An indication of the importance that the international community sets on this is given by the resolution adopted by the World Conservation Congress in 2000 recommending that its members “prohibit by law, all exploration and extraction of mineral resources in protected areas corresponding to IUCN Protected Area Management Categories I to IV” (IUCN 2000).58 For culturally significant sites, there are codes of industry good practice guidelines such as the IFC’s performance standards and the ICMM principles. 9.7 SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
The fifth chevron in the EI Value Chain is unique in the sense that it does not follow sequentially from the preceding ones. For EI operations to be truly sustainable, they need to have social and environmental elements added throughout, particularly in the first chevron. To achieve development that is sustainable, policies must be designed to ■
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produce clear and lasting (sustainable) benefits from extractive industry (EI) activities, and address, in a comprehensive and integrated way, the potential and actual impacts on environment and society.
Comprehensive ESIAs and mitigation plans should be required of all EI sector projects, and they usually are. Very few countries do not have such regulations. Governments should also work to ensure the institutional capacity to enforce SEAs (or SESAs) and related regulations. The reasons for this are clear enough. EI sector policies, plans, and programs can have significant externalities or spinoff impacts—both positive and negative—on society and on the physical environments. Sustainability in the extractives sector has become a matter of maximizing the social and economic benefits from an investment while at the same time minimizing the negative
impacts on communities and the environment. There are now various ways of leveraging extractives projects for wider development gains: resources for infrastructure arrangements, resource corridors, and local benefit initiatives. An attraction of these is that they envisage a partnership relationship between the host government and the investors and the relationship is therefore less “legalistic.” However, sustainability goes much beyond mitigation. It also asks questions about the relevance of a mine or commodity in a sustainable future. In some cases the answers will be “no” to a proposed mining or oil and gas development. The relevance of international law in this area is considerable. This extends well beyond the influence of international or regional conventions and encompasses the design, adoption, and use by countries and nonstate actors like companies of standards. Many issues are increasingly perceived as being common concerns since they have cross-border effects and therefore require joint action in such areas as human rights, environmental protection, gas flaring, and climate change mitigation, to name only the obvious examples. International best practice is being shaped not only by law making in the traditional sense (by states) but by international initiatives deliberately aimed at involving a variety of actors or stakeholders, generating a wide consensus and rich body of knowledge in specialist areas. Attempts to tackle the long-standing enclave character of mining and oil and gas projects are well under way, with resource corridors being one of these, aimed at transforming and leveraging a large but enclave commercial project or industry investment and its needs for infrastructure and goods and services into a sustainable and diversified economic space. Key features in this are the creation of a viable financial structure based on expected government revenues as a result of the EI activity and the establishment of government, private sector, and civil society capacities to develop and implement agreed plans. Currently, resource corridors have been constrained by a lack of proper ex ante consideration of environmental and community factors, by insufficient government capacity to plan in an integrated fashion, and by a lack of political rationale based on sound economic grounds. Project-specific decommissioning and closure plans should be available for each operation. If a commercialscale operation does not have, or is not required to have, a decommissioning and closure plan, this should be corrected and a plan prepared without delay. A decommissioning and closure plan is essential even for an operation at the start of
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