Africa’s heritage sites under siege

280612: The 1 100-year-old Mapungubwe World Heritage Site in Limpopo has been compromised by opencast coal mining.

280612: The 1 100-year-old Mapungubwe World Heritage Site in Limpopo has been compromised by opencast coal mining.

Published Oct 7, 2013

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Cape Town - One quarter of all World Heritage Sites in Africa are now threatened by mining, and the environmental impact of the mining industry globally is “horrendous”, the World Wilderness Congress WILD10 has been told.

The congress, which started in Salamanca, Spain, last week, also heard that areas not immune to mining pressures include many that are sacred or culturally important to indigenous communities – the so-called “first stewards” of the Earth – ranging from those living in the Australian outback to the high Arctic wilderness.

Wayne Bergman, a lawyer and member of the indigenous communities that live in the huge Kimberley area of northern Australia, said on Saturday that drilling using the controversial fracking method to confirm the presence there of what had been estimated at trillions of metres of shale gas, was likely to start within the next 12 months and was of huge concern to the communities.

There were “an avalanche of challenges” to finding a balance between mining and the communities’ cultural needs, he said.

Lars-Anders Baer of the Swedish Sami parliament – the Sami people are the indigenous inhabitants of Greater Laponia, an Arctic area in northern Sweden and Norway – said this essentially wilderness landscape was vital to the physical survival of many Sami people like the reindeer herders and to the survival of the Sami culture.

“The reality is that we are surrounded by mines, and sad to say, there will be more in the future.”

In an earlier session on Friday, Dr Exequiel Ezcurra, director of the University of California’s Institute for Mexico and the US and the chairman of the previous congress in 2009, WILD9, said there had been “great successes” in the intervening four years but that “not everything has been good news”.

He cited the “explosion” of open-pit gold mining in Mexico as an example of how substantial wilderness areas were at risk. “For every wedding ring you buy, almost 20 metric tons of dirt is dumped into the environment, and the amount of cyanide that is dumped into the water is enough to kill 6 000 people.”

Open-pit mining was one of the biggest challenges wilderness conservationists faced throughout the developed world, he said.

Liz Hosken of the GAIA Foundation in the UK and South Africa said there’d been a massive growth of the mining industry in the past decade and that even indigenous territories that had been protected as recently as a decade ago were now “absolutely littered” with mining concessions and operations.

 

Pointing out that one in four World Heritage Sites in Africa were now either threatened by mining or had already been affected, she added: “The scale of destruction is horrendous.”

 

WILD10 will be debating the issue at workshops this week and will help to produce a “new social compact” – likely to be formalised at the IUCN’s World Parks Congress in Sydney next year – aimed at reconciling mining and the conservation of protected areas, cultural heritage and indigenous people’s rights. One of the leaders of this process is Nigel Crawhall of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and who heads the union’s Cape Town-based “Theme on Indigenous Peoples, Local Communities, Equity and Protected Areas” directorate. - Cape Argus

 

l John Yeld’s attendance at WILD-10 is being sponsored by the Hans Hoheisen Trust.

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