This was just published in Nature Communications.
That’s gonna leave a mark.
Here is the Abstract, (emphasis mine):
Renewable energy production is necessary to halt climate change and reverse associated biodiversity losses. However, generating the required technologies and infrastructure will drive an increase in the production of many metals, creating new mining threats for biodiversity. Here, we map mining areas and assess their spatial coincidence with biodiversity conservation sites and priorities.
Mining potentially influences 50 million km2 of Earth’s land surface, with 8% coinciding with Protected Areas, 7% with Key Biodiversity Areas, and 16% with Remaining Wilderness. Most mining areas (82%) target materials needed for renewable energy production, and areas that overlap with Protected Areas and Remaining Wilderness contain a greater density of mines (our indicator of threat severity) compared to the overlapping mining areas that target other materials.
Mining threats to biodiversity will increase as more mines target materials for renewable energy production and, without strategic planning, these new threats to biodiversity may surpass those averted by climate change mitigation.
This is not convenient.
Here they discuss “Future mining threats to biodiversity”.
The global area influenced by mining will almost certainly grow in extent and density in future, and the increased demand for renewable energy technologies and infrastructure will likely be one contributing factor. While diverting some of the materials used in non-renewable energy infrastructure may minimize threats of renewable energy production to biodiversity, fossil fuels will still likely play an important role in meeting the future energy demands of a growing global population. We discovered a greater proportion of pre-operational mines targeting materials needed for renewable energy production (83.9%) compared to operational mines targeting these materials (72.8%; Supplementary Table 2), and that pre-operational mining areas targeting the materials critical for renewables also seem more dense than those targeting other materials (3.2 vs. 2.7; Supplementary Table 2). Increasing the extent and density of mining areas will obviously cause additional threats to biodiversity, and our analysis reveals that a greater proportion of mines targeting materials for renewable energy production may further exacerbate threats to biodiversity in some areas (here demonstrated by their increased mining density within Key Biodiversity Areas and Remaining Wilderness at the global scale).
Careful strategic planning is urgently required to ensure that mining threats to biodiversity caused by renewable energy production do not surpass the threats averted by climate change mitigation and any effort to slow fossil fuel extraction and use. Habitat loss and degradation currently threaten >80% of endangered species, while climate change directly affects 20%37. While we cannot yet quantify potential habitat losses associated with future mining for renewable energies (and compare this to any reduced risks of averting climate change), our results illustrate that associated habitat loss could be a major issue. At the local scale, minimizing these impacts will require effective environmental impact assessments and management. Importantly, all new projects must adhere strictly to the principals of the Mitigation Hierarchy38, where biodiversity impacts are first avoided where possible before allowing compensation activities elsewhere. While compensation may help to overcome some of the expected biodiversity impacts of mining in some places39, rarely does this approach achieve No Net Loss outcomes universally39,40.
There is urgent need to understand the size of mining risks to biodiversity (climate change, and efforts to avert it) and strategically account for them in conservation plans and policies. Yet, none of these potential tradeoffs are seriously considered in international climate policies3, nor are new mining threats addressed in global discussions around post-2020 United Nation’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity28,41. Necessary actions include strengthening policies to avoid negative consequences of mining in places fundamentally important for conservation outcomes, and developing necessary landscape plans that explicitly address current and future mining threats. These actions must also be supported by a significant research effort to overcome current knowledge deficits. A systematic understanding of the spatially explicit consequences (rather than potential threats, as investigated here) of various mining activities on specific biodiversity features, including those that occur in marine systems and at varying distances from mine sites (rather than within a predefined distance of 50 km, as done here), is required.
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You can fly on many inter-city routes in Australia and never see a mine. If you do see one, chances are it will be a quarry for rock, sand or gravel for construction.
Mines can be operated within project areas of 20 square kilometres on average. Some shallow, open cut mines like for coal are rather larger than this, but many other mines are smaller. Even a total of 1,000 mines of this area, far more than we have, would take up 20,000 sq km of Australia’s total land area of 7,700,000 sq km, some 0.025% of the total land – temporarily.
Mine life seldom exceeds 30 years. Post-mining reclamation is of excellent standard in Australia, with most of the mine effects being hard to find after another 30 years.
The authors of this paper seem to have disconnects from the reality of easily-measured life and size of mines.
Geoff S
Correction, 0.25% of total land area. Geoff S
The basic premise is screwed.
Mining is not a threat to biodiversity.
Biodiversity claims are a major threat to mining.
Without modern mining, we do not have the money or means for best biodiversity management.
The Greens keep telling us we are using the resources of “three Earths” in their effort to make us cut back. But their logic curiously does not seem to apply when extraction for “renewables” are concerned. I wonder how long before the majority of the genuine Greens will start to become alarmed at the huge proliferation of mining that will happen soon. But since you can count on the mainstream media to avoid reporting on these inconvenient facts most likely they will never find out.
You will have noticed a heavy emphasis on recycling and reuse in green policies perhaps?
griff,
For an example, over 95% of the gold that has ever been mined can still be accounted for. That is but one example of recycling. What a shame for you to have to admit that the recycling was routinely put into effect and made to work, long, long before silly green ideas were even in the thinking stage.
Industry owns and invented recycling. Greens have no claim to it.
A further example from when I worked in paper making. You might not know, but paper fibres can stand only 3-4 recycles before they lose their critical paper-making properties. The economics of paper recycling are largely determined by the abundance of used paper that can be verified as not so recycled already that it is already worn out. Thus, offcuts from printing presses are more valuable than fish and chips paper. There are regular schoolboy/girl howlers in green talk about recycling. Basically, it is mostly plain ignorant, laughable stuff that fails to reflect working experience because so few green have ever done productive or inventive work in the industries they claim they can improve.
But, you hang in there as a continuing drain on the economy, contented that you have made a career high of being accepted as a WUWT blogger. Geoff S
Wood is a renewable energy source and it doesn’t require mining- and it is sustainable and if used in a power plant- it provides base load power. This is why the Michael Moore filmed should never have included woody biomass power plants in with wind and solar.
It can be argued that it’s not feasible if not subsidized. Well, I suggest subsidies are everywhere in many products and services but not obvious- so the subsidy argument doesn’t go far.
Another argument against wood for energy is that it results in carbon emissions. Sure, but there is more carbon in the forests of North America every year despite a vast amount of harvesting. The carbon from an individual tree isn’t what should be tracked- but carbon in entire forested regions.
Also, most of the wood going into energy is a by product of long term forestry- so that we can all have that wonderful wood in our homes, furniture, and paper products. Most of the wood going into energy is just weeds in the forest that we foresters strive to remove. No other market exists for most of the lowest quality wood.
Oh, another knee jerk reaction against wood for energy is “it can’t go far to replace fossil fuels”. Yes, that’s true, but so what? It makes a contribution and of course there are many people, especially active in this site, who don’t think we need to replace fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, I practice forestry in Massachusetts- the home of the most fanatic forestry hating people on the planet. Not only do they hate wood for energy- they hate all logging- even when done to the highest standards. They’ve managed to kill several woody biomass power plants- they succeeded in stopping new pellet producing plants- and now are fighting to end all logging on almost a million acres of state forest land. If they win that- they’ll fight to end all logging on private land- and that will result in many of those owners selling their forest to developers including solar “farms”.
And, the same folks who hate forestry hate all fossil fuels- refusing to allow any new gas pipelines into the state, they’ve succeeded in closing all the coal power plants here and most of the nuclear plants with the rest to shut down soon. They hate forestry but they adore huge solar and wind farms- as long as they’re not in THEIR backyards.
Yes they really do hate forestry. So far in Scotland, UK, they have managed to chop down an estimated 14 million trees to make way for legions of wind turbines.
Trees planted in the last few decades as commercial timber on what was previous treeless terrain?
commercial timber forests are better than no forests- it wasn’t “previous” if you go back far enough
no doubt all of the British Isles were once heavily forested
From the article: “Renewable energy production is necessary to halt climate change and reverse associated biodiversity losses.”
No, “renewable” energy is not necessary, or desirable. Nuclear power generation is the only way to go if you want to eliminate CO2 production without destroying the economy at the same time. It’s about time the Greens woke up to this fact.