The amount of land directly disturbed by mining is a key generic environmental pressure indicator. A novel method based on the measurement of the cumulative net area disturbances using Landsat satellite images and its correlation with the cumulative ore production at the mine site was applied. Weighted disturbance rates (WDRs) were calculated indicating the annual quantity of hectares newly disturbed per million metric tons of ore extracted. Results show that open pit (OP) have a smaller average WDR (5.05 ha/Mt) than underground (UG) mines (11.85 ha/Mt). This is explained by the relation between the annual amounts of new net area disturbed and of ore extracted which is larger for UG than for OP mines due to the annual extraction volume (lower for UG). Overall findings demonstrate that bauxite mining has the highest WDR (7.98 ha/Mt), followed by gold (6.70 ha/Mt), silver (5.53 ha/Mt), copper (4.5 ha/Mt) and iron (4.25 ha/Mt).
In a globalized economy, the use of natural resources is determined by the demand of modern production and consumption systems, and by infrastructure development. Sustainable natural resource use will require good governance and management based on sound scientific information, data and indicators. There is a rich literature on natural resource management, yet the national and global scale and macro-economic policy making has been underrepresented. We provide an overview of the scholarly literature on multi-scale governance of natural resources, focusing on the information required by relevant actors from local to global scale. Global natural resource use is largely determined by national, regional, and local policies. We observe that in recent decades, the development of public policies of natural resource use has been fostered by an "inspiration cycle" between the research, policy and statistics community, fostering social learning. Effective natural resource policies require adequate monitoring tools, in particular indicators for the use of materials, energy, land, and water as well as waste and GHG emissions of national economies. We summarize the state-of-the-art of the application of accounting methods and data sources for national material flow accounts and indicators, including territorial and product-life-cycle based approaches. We show how accounts on natural resource use can inform the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and argue that information on natural resource use, and in particular footprint indicators, will be indispensable for a consistent implementation of the SDGs. We recognize that improving the knowledge base for global natural resource use will require further institutional development including at national and international levels, for which we outline options.
Poor sustainability and increasing economic shortcomings in fossil raw material use besides further technical developments of substitutes lead to a growing potential for CO2-utilisation. Hence, we balanced CO2-based methane and methanol production in a life cycle assessment and identified CO2-utilisation as a greenhouse gas saving method. However, it requires a lot of renewable energy.
Biodiversity loss is widely recognized as a serious global environmental change process. While large-scale metal mining activities do not belong to the top drivers of such change, these operations exert or may intensify pressures on biodiversity by adversely changing habitats, directly and indirectly, at local and regional scales. So far, analyses of global spatial dynamics of mining and its burden on biodiversity focused on the overlap between mines and protected areas or areas of high value for conservation. However, it is less clear how operating metal mines are globally exerting pressure on zones of different biodiversity richness; a similar gap exists for unmined but known mineral deposits. By using vascular plants' diversity as a proxy to quantify overall biodiversity, this study provides a first examination of the global spatial distribution of mines and deposits for five key metals across different biodiversity zones. The results indicate that mines and deposits are not randomly distributed, but concentrated within intermediate and high diversity zones, especially bauxite and silver. In contrast, iron, gold, and copper mines and deposits are closer to a more proportional distribution while showing a high concentration in the intermediate biodiversity zone. Considering the five metals together, 63% and 61% of available mines and deposits, respectively, are located in intermediate diversity zones, comprising 52% of the global land terrestrial surface. 23% of mines and 20% of ore deposits are located in areas of high plant diversity, covering 17% of the land. 13% of mines and 19% of deposits are in areas of low plant diversity, comprising 31% of the land surface. Thus, there seems to be potential for opening new mines in areas of low biodiversity in the future.
In the future, the capacities of renewable SNG (synthetic natural gas) will expand significantly. Pilot plants are underway to use surplus renewable power, mainly from wind, for electrolysis and the production of hydrogen, which is methanated and fed into the existing gas pipeline grid. Pilot projects aim at the energetic use of SNG for households and transport in particular for gas fueled cars. Another option could be the use of SNG as feedstock in chemical industry.
The early stage of development raises the question of whether SNG should be better used for mobility or the production of chemicals. This study compares the global warming potential (GWP) of the production of fossil natural gas (NG) and carbon-dioxide (CO2)-based SNG and its use for car transport versus chemical use in the form of synthesis gas. Since the potential of wind energy for SNG production is mainly located in northern Germany, the consequences by a growing distance between production in the North and transport to the South of Germany are also examined.
The results indicate that CO2-based SNG produced with wind power would lead to lower GWP when substituting NG for both uses in either transport or chemical production. Differences of the savings potential occur in short-distance pipeline transport. The critical factor is the energy required for compression along the process chain.