معدن و تغییرات آب و هوایی: بررسی و چارچوبی برای تجزیه و تحلیل Mining and climate change: A review and framework for analysis

I. Climate change as an emerging driver of mining policy On March 29, 2017, El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly unanimously passed a law banning metal mining in the country. “El Salvador makes history as first nation to impose blanket ban on metal mining” The Guardian (2017) stated, while The New York Times (2017) reported that “El Salvador, Prizing Water over Gold, Bans All Metal Mining.” Though passed by a left-of-center government of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), conservative, pro-market, anti-regulation lawmakers of El Salvador’s Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) also voted for the law. Reflecting on that vote, one of these ARENA legislators, Johnny Wright Sol, “who worked to persuade his businessfriendly party to support the law, said that climate change was already having an impact on El Salvador. ‘More than a theory or an uncertain science that it might have been 10 years ago, today for Salvadorans, it is a reality’”(New York Times, 2017). El Salvador’s law points directly to the increasing significance of climate change for strategic decisions on the regulation of mining. For several years prior to the law, critics of the mining sector in El Salvador had been drawing attention to the vulnerability of the country’s water resources under conditions of climate change, and argued that to allow mining in the country would aggravate this vulnerability (Broad and Cavanagh, 2015; Spalding, 2013; Moran, 2005). A Strategic Environmental Assessment of the mining sector also noted that mining would use water resources that climate change would make scarcer, and that the increasing frequency of severe storms would threaten the failure of tailing dams and other mine infrastructure, with potentially serious consequences for water contamination (TAU, 2011; Bebbington et al., 2015). Though perhaps an extreme example, the case of El Salvador demonstrates the significance of climate change for the future of the mining sector, particularly in water-constrained national environments.