environment

Rio Tinto’s biodiversity accounting comes up short in Madagascar

Amy Glass lives in Madagascar and has taken all the photos in this post.

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Rio Tinto says it will have a net positive impact on biodiversity wherever it does business. In Madagascar — one of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots — Rio Tinto’s net positive impact strategy relies on a series of assumptions that are increasingly being questioned. Through local subsidiary Qit Minerals Madagascar (QMM), it operates the world’s largest ilmenite mine along the island’s southeastern coast, in a unique and fragile ecosystem comprised of littoral forest and wetlands.

The Rio Tinto/QMM biodiversity strategy rests on three pillars: avoidance, mitigation and offsets. It claims to avoid biodiversity destruction by dedicating one tenth of the 6000 hectare mineral deposit zone as conservation areas. Many experts say these areas may be too small to prevent biodiversity loss (Conservation International, 2001; WWF 2005). Given the uniqueness of the ecosystem being destroyed, still others have adopted a “wait and see” attitude.

Unavoidable biodiversity loss is to be mitigated through the partial restoration of the mining zone after extraction of the ilmenite. Again, scientists are divided over the feasibility of this proposition. QMM has spent colossal sums of money to catalogue species and recreate a model of what the littoral area looked like before decades of deforestation and other human-driven degradation. Yet recent evidence from paleoecologist Virah Sawmy shows that QMM assumptions appear to be quite wrong. Instead of the total forest cover postulated by QMM, there seems to have been a mosaic of forest and grassland, due not to human activity but to natural variances in soil humidity (Virah Sawmy 2009). There is as yet no common scientific vision of what needs to be restored, and QMM is thus free to decide what species to reintroduce.

Lastly, QMM supports 35,000 hectares of protected areas through a series of public-private partnerships. These protected areas are described by QMM as “biodiversity offsets,” which are crucial to the net positive impact equation. They are designed to bridge any gap in biodiversity loss after avoidance and mitigation measures are taken. The concept has created new funding mechanisms for nature conservation worldwide and has thus been greeted with great enthusiasm by environmental organisations. For the concept of offsets to function, however, biodiversity must be a resource or “capital” that can be quantified and exchanged, like meters of timber or kilos of carbon. The study of biodiversity involves the fields of ecology, restoration biology, and genetics, which are among the least developed and understood of the physical sciences (Burgin 2008:811). Measuring biodiversity is thus a contentious, value-ridden process. Where the environmental destruction that requires offsetting is to occur in a unique ecosystem such as the littoral forest of southeastern Madagascar, then offsetting is logically flawed.

References

> Burgin, S. 2008. BioBanking: An Environmental Scientist’s View of the Role of Biodiversity Banking Offsets in Conservation. Biodiversity Conservation 17: 807-816
> Conservation International. 2001. Review of an Ilmenite Project in Southeast Madagascar.
> Conservation International – Biodiversity Hotspots
> Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). 2005. An Update on the QMM Mining Project in the Anosy Region.

Further links

> Gerety, Rowan Moore. 2009. ‘Mining and biodiversity offsets in Madagascar: Conservation or Conservation Opportunities?‘
> QMM Biodiversity Programme
> Madagascar – Measuring Our Effect on Biodiversity
> Mining Magazine – Biodiversity Offsets (pdf)
> Virah-Sawmy, Malika. 2009. Ecosystem management in Madagascar during global change. Conservation Letters 2(4): 163 – 170

© 2009 People and Development.