Miners and community stakeholders in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales have agreed to a list of actions to address the impacts of coal mining on a range of issues from mine rehabilitation to water assessments, long term health impacts to local employment and skills training.
Sue-Ern Tan
High Quality Photo
Earlier this year, the New South Wales Minerals Council (NSWMC) commissioned a stakeholder survey to start a dialogue on the impacts of coal mining. The survey showed stakeholders are broadly concerned with public health, environment and economic issues and want more interaction with mining companies.
The NSWMC commissioned The Australian Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (ACCSR) to survey community concerns and to establish “a dialogue with the community about the role of mining, minimising the collective impacts of mining in the Upper Hunter and the region’s future.” The Upper Hunter is the site of coal mining for producers Anglo American, Ashton Coal, BHP Billiton Mt Arthur Coal, Bloomfield Colliery, Coal & Allied, Muswellbrook Coal, Peabody Energy Australia, Vale Australia – Integra Coal Operations, and Xstrata Coal.
As a result of the survey, the NSWMC, miners, community stakeholders and local and state politicians held a one-day workshop in July to generate a list of actions that would begin to address community concerns. Ideas were put to a vote of the 69 participants and the top ten ideas were slated for action.
“We understand that the community wants to see direct action on the issues that concern them,” the NSWMC said in a report on the workshop. “Those actions need to be the right ones and need to be developed along with the community. Many of the top ten ideas from the workshop deal with the ‘big picture’ including changes to policy and the development of new policy, plans and regulation. The development of these ideas into concrete actions will require the input of multiple stakeholders and the community and further dialogue will be a vital part of ensuring the community’s objectives are considered.”
The list includes the development of a new synoptic plan for mine rehabilitation to meet the needs of the region, such that the mines are integrated with the landscape, “whether that is agriculture, biodiversity forestry, housing development or other land uses,” the report said. The NSW government is currently developing a land use plan for the Upper Hunter Valley, NSWMC noted.
Three of the ten actions focused on water related issues – the organisation of a water study of the region to understand aquifers and surface water, which will take existing data and fill in the gaps of information; the development of independent and transparent water assessment of mining projects to review each mine’s water assessments, and the development of an aquifer interference policy in conjunction with the NSW state government to set minimum requirements for buffer zones between mining activities and the edges of streams, rivers and alluviums.
In the top 10 list were calls for long term health assessments to go into director general requirements, with calls for assessments to be done at the exploration stage. The NSWMC disagreed with the call for assessments to be done at the exploration stage, as the full scope of a final project is not known at that stage, but the council did agree to development with the NSW Department of Health to develop a guideline for the preparation of health risk assessments.
Other issues included the development of a strategic land use plan, a call to the state government to fast track “regionally significant infrastructure” and for local employment to be the focus for contractors and mining companies with a focus on training local people for jobs and more local apprenticeships.
“The region’s coal producers know they have to do things differently to minimise the cumulative impacts of mining,” said Sue-Ern Tan, NSWMC deputy CEO, said in a statement accompanying the report’s release. “We never thought it would be easy to address the challenges that have emerged from the growth of the industry or that the solutions would be a simple ‘quick fix’. But the desire in the community and the industry to work together to address these challenges has been heartening and it will need to be the linchpin for sustaining this progress.”
See Also: