On Sunday, November 21, 2021 at 9:59:39 AM UTC-5, DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves wrote:
On Sunday, November 21, 2021 at 9:37:42 AM UTC-5, DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves wrote:
power struggle over cobalt is rattling the green energy revolution.
Cobalt is vital for electric vehicles and the push against climate change. Two-thirds of it comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the quest for the metal has demonstrated how the clean energy revolution is caught in a cycle of
exploitation, an investigation by The Times found.
In particular, China and the U.S. are rivals in Congo ...
-
They won't stop destroying the Congo until all the pygmies are gone and fauna are dead and the forest converted to oil palm plantations. Goodbye Eden, hello king Leopold prison.
No surprise, President Biden's son is making green money from this rape of the Congo:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-biden-firm-chinese-purchase-cobalt-mine.amp
Update
It might be difficult for engineers who are developing the technologies to understand the social effects. By working together, we can form a whole picture of the consequences of resource extraction."
Unintended consequences of decarbonization
What Dunn and Young discovered was deeply troubling. They found cobalt mining was associated with increases in violence, substance abuse, food and water insecurity, and physical and mental health challenges. Community members reported losing communal
land, farmland and homes, which miners literally dug up in order to extract cobalt. Without farmland, Congolese people were sometimes forced to cross international borders into Zambia just to purchase food.
Understanding cobalt's human cost
Miners at a cobalt cleaning site in DRC wash ore in water, rendering it unsafe to drink. Credit: Northwestern University
"You might think of mining as just digging something up," Young said. "But they are not digging on vacant land. Homelands are dug up. People are literally digging holes in their living room floors. The repercussions of mining can touch almost every
aspect of life."
Waste generated from mining cobalt and other metals can pollute water, air and soil, leading to decreased crop yields, contaminated food and water, and respiratory and reproductive health issues. Miners reported that working conditions were unsafe,
unfair and stressful. Several workers noted that they feared mineshaft collapses.
As industry leaders move toward decarbonization to slow, stop or even reverse human-caused climate change, technologies are increasingly relying on batteries instead of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, the effects of these technologies on social well-being
are understudied and data related to these effects are insufficient for use in policy-making decisions.
"If we're trying to be do-gooders by caring for the environment, then the environment shouldn't be limited to only the natural environment—but also the human environment," said Young, who studies water insecurityacross a range of global contexts.
Offering new solutions
Throughout their work, Dunn, Young and their team found little in the way of established guidance on best practices for conducting S-LCA, including little guidance on how to conduct interviews and a lack of consensus on how to use and analyze data from
stakeholders.
"Most of this work has been conceptualized by natural scientists who have limited knowledge about social impacts," Dunn said. "Measuring environmental effects of a technology is sometimes as simple as adding a sensor to measure emissions. But trying to
measure intangible social effects like mental health is much harder."
"And things that aren't measured remain invisible," Young added.
Because the quality of the social impact assessment relies on the quality of the data, the researchers identified five categories of data sources, which can be leveraged to better understand localized effects of mining: (1) interviews and focus groups of
affected community members; (2) local public records, including land-related court claims, documentation of forced migration and publicly available health records; (3) cross-culturally validated scales, including data collected by national statistics
agencies and organizations such as UNICEF and the World Bank; (4) data collected for the Sustainable Development Goals; and (5) remote sensing and imagery, including satellite imagery showing how farmland has changed after cobalt mining is established.
The researchers believe such methods can be applied to other scenarios beyond cobalt mining to gather social data surrounding emerging technologies.
"We have a long way to go before we can put S-LCA results in front of decision-makers in the same way we can with E-LCA results," Dunn said. "In the meantime, our society is going through huge changes, including climate change, so we feel a sense of
urgency. We hope that policy makers recognize the urgency of the human costs of cobalt mining sooner rather than later."
The study, "Addressing the social life cycle inventory analysis data gap: Insights from a case study of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo," was supported by Leslie and Mac McQuown, the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems and the
Carnegie Corporation.
More information: Addressing the social life cycle inventory analysis data gap: Insights from a case study of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, One Earth (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.oneear.2021.11.007
Journal information: One Earth
Provided by Northwestern University
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