Delivering on climate goals will require a rapid halt to deforestation, and reforestation and afforestation at scale. But it will also require a secure and sustainable supply of minerals and materials for green technologies and sustainable infrastructure. Many of these commodities are found in critical forest landscapes, placing forests at increased risk as demand for minerals increases. This paper explores the mining sector’s impacts on forests, and the potential for ‘forest-smart’ mining policies and practices to support deforestation-free mineral supply chains.
Acknowledgments
This research paper draws upon extensive research and stakeholder engagement with experts from government, donor agencies, multilateral development banks, the private sector and civil society. While the individual contributions are too numerous to mention, special thanks are expressed to the 42 experts from the mining, forest, finance and emerging-technology sectors who participated in the workshop ‘The Role of Innovative Technologies and Finance in Advancing Forest-Smart Mining’, held at Chatham House in May 2019. Thanks are also owed to stakeholders from government, international organizations and NGOs who so generously lent their time and expertise to research discussions in Beijing in late 2019.
The author is particularly grateful to Kirsten Hund and her colleagues at the World Bank for their guidance and support for this project. This paper builds upon the World Bank-commissioned forest-smart mining reports, which were delivered by a consortium including Fauna and Flora International, Levin Sources, Fairfields Consulting and Swedish Geological AB. The author is especially grateful to the lead authors of those reports – Pippa Howard, Estelle Levin-Nally and Sally Fairfield – for their contributions to the workshop and their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Special thanks are also owed to Julia Falconer and colleagues at the former UK Department for International Development (DFID) and at the UK embassy in Beijing.
The workshop and this paper benefited from contributions from Alison Hoare, Duncan Brack and Oli Brown. The author thanks Tim Benton, John Drexhage, Thiago Uehara, Jiangwen Guo, Jade Saunders, Glada Lahn, Erin Matson, Suzanne Greene and two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of the paper; Pippa Lockwood for her research assistance; Melissa MacEwen for her coordination of the workshop and the project; Anna Brown and Jake Statham for editing; and Soapbox for design.
This project and the publication of this paper would not have been possible without generous support from the World Bank’s Program on Forests (PROFOR) and the Forest, Markets and Climate Governance (FMCG) programme formerly run by DFID. However, the views expressed do not reflect either institution’s official policies. Any omissions or mistakes remain the author’s own.