Recently Completed Work
Event: International Roundtable on the Restoration of Mining Legacy Sites, Toronto, March 2008
The culmination of a year’s research including a global survey and expert input, together with ICMM and IUCN we convened this event in which 48 people from 13 different countries representing a diverse group of stakeholders participated. The roundtable was a key output of the joint Dialogue on Mining and Biodiversity instigated by the World Conservation Union and the International Council on Mining and Metals. The goal of the roundtable was to produce recommendations to address mining legacies, specifically concerning funding and finance, legislation, partnerships and knowledge transfer.
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Project: Post-Mining Options in Namaqualand, South Africa
At the invitation of Conservation International (CI), we co-hosted a week-long workshop with CI in Namaqualand to develop a master-plan that recasts the legacy of 80-years of diamond mining on the Namaqualand coast into an appropriate conservation-based and sustainable new economy. The workshop involved experts in the fields of tourism development, mine rehabilitation, renewable energy, arid farming, architecture, landscape architecture and mine closure. The results were presented to more than 60 officials from the regional and national government, national parks, local councillors, regional politicians and senior executives of De Beers. Options for how this develops further are currently under discussion.
Project: Clay Futures Community Engagement, Cornwall, UK
Working in close partnership with a number of local voluntary groups, we ran a large-scale community consultation of five china clay mining villages in central Cornwall affected by post-mining impacts as the local industry retrenches. Taking a creative engagement approach, we are working with five local communities to establish their hopes, aspirations and thoughts on what their future local economy might look like. We were commissioned by Restormel Borough Council with funding from the UK government’s Department for Communities and Local Government.
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Event: Life After Mining Workshop, Johannesburg, October 2008
We convened a one-day workshop on the socio-economic implications of mine closure as part of the international Mine Closure Conference in Johannesburg, hosted by the University of Witwatersrand. It attracted 400 people from around the world and our workshop specifically highlighted the community aspects of closure.
Report: EDM, Portugal
We were recently commissioned by EDM SA (the Portuguese agency responsible for a large clean-up programme in Portugal) to produce a report and a foreword for a book on the Portuguese national rehabilitation programme. The report outlined the business case for on-going public support and expenditure in restoring many of the mining facilities including some heritage sites, drawing on the experience of successful programmes elsewhere in job creation and community regeneration.