Political science and sustainability are unusual bedfellows, but I put this odd couple together to illustrate an important principle for corporate sustainability responsibility in the South African mining sector.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology intellectual Noam Chomsky, in his book Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, refers to the ‘second global super power†of world opinion as a mechanism for effecting positive change against American hegemony.
I was thinking about Chomsky’s thesis recently while waiting for transfer to a small Tanzanian mining village from the bustling entropy of Arusha. In a developing regional context such as this, I wondered, what are the main drivers that will ensure real corporate responsibility and sustainability reporting?
Laudable though they may be, guidelines like the R500-a-copy King Report on Corporate Governance mean very little to rural herdsmen getting by on R50 a month while suffering exposure to contaminated groundwater from upstream mining.
A leading auditing group recently claimed high levels of environmental disclosure and reporting in the South African mining industry. But this means little if the meat of those disclosures are not dissected by the communities they support and impact upon.
For example, one local group reported that all was well when it inherited some mining interests in a corporate merger. But, unbeknown to local residents, it also inherited a quarter of a million litres of pollution in uneasy subterranean stasis 10km from a regional centre.
This example is indicative of the problems of the ‘realness†of reporting. If there were different (read higher) levels of awareness, knowledge and consequent noise emanating from Joey Public, there would certainly be very different levels of reporting — and the management actions that are reported upon — by the mining industry.
Time and again, critical environmental incidents in South Africa’s mining history have become issues because public and community opinion (or impact) has forced them into this realm. I think of the Saldanha steel controversy, the AECI sulphur fire in 1995, and more recently the controversies over the Wavecrest mining application and the Cape Plc asbestos case.
Community and public action develop from opinion and belief — but before this, individual and community knowledge, education and awareness are required. Chomsky’s views on opinion as the lever of positive change apply in principle to this consideration — albeit on a less dramatic scale than the global geo-political one.
Corporate sustainability in the mining industry is, in many ways, only as good as the community pressures that invoke it.
This is not to denigrate the sustainability management and reporting by many mining companies, which are a valuable component of the country’s overall environmental administration.
However, the South African public needs to play a role for these programmes to be effective. Increasing awareness is perhaps the most important driver of positive environmental change and management. It could be as simple as one individual becoming a greater advocate of environmentalism and sustainability, or as complex as country- and region-wide education initiatives.
I predict that 2005 and the years ahead will be positive ones on this matter. Corporate sustainability and its reporting in the mining sector are going to have to become increasingly rigorous and defensible in the face of improving public opinion and awareness.
External, independent verification will be critical — an acknowledged existing weakness in the sector. And environmental authorities, as representatives of the increasingly aware public, will have to enforce proactive environmental management and reporting in the sector more stringently.
Brent Johnson is a principal environmental scientist with Ninham Shand Consulting Services. He writes in his personal capacity.