Identifying and Evaluating Impacts - Mining and the Environment: From Ore to Metal - page 399

sometimes overemphasize the project benei ts to help ensure that the project i nds public
acceptance. Both these view-points are equally unhelpful, and environmental assessment
should avoid being guided by one-sided arguments.

Environmental assessment should
avoid being guided by one-sided
arguments.

Available Resources

Of pragmatic importance is the question of resources available to assess environmental
impacts. Any discussion of resource commitments must recognize two very real dangers:
over-complexity and over-simplicity . Between these undesirable extremes is arguably always
a useful working range of options for selecting an approach that matches resource needs
with project complexity. Obvious resource constraints are money, time, and available
expertise.
The cost of environmental assessment should not be viewed as a lost investment. Costs
for an environmental impact assessment study differ from country to country, and from
project to project. A compounding factor is that there is not always a clear distinction as to
whether a particular study is related to environmental assessment or to mine planning, as
many studies contribute information to both. However, we can look to the experience with
large projects for some indicative costs. According to Goodland and Mercier (1999), the
cost of preparing an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) rarely exceeds one percent
of the total project cost. Capital investments for new mining projects are in the order of
several hundreds of million of US dollars, and of course, it is much easier to keep environ-
mental assessment costs down to one percent on a project whose total budget is $500 mil-
lion or more than on one whose budget is $10 million. Our experience on a wide range of

The cost of preparing an
Environmental Impact
Assessment (EIA) rarely exceeds
one percent of the total project
cost.

CASE 9.2
Eastern Kalimantan - a Region Subject to Dramatic Change

Until recently, most of Eastern Kalimantan was covered in
dense equatorial rainforest in a patchwork of swamps and
low hills. First came the loggers, clear-felling the forest,
removing the valuable timber and burning the remaining
vegetation. During the El Nino drought years of 1982-83,
and again in 1997-98, fi res spread into uncleared areas,
including peat swamps where the drought had caused
peat to dry suffi ciently to ignite and where fi res continued
to burn for many months. The results in 1998 included
more than 200,000 hectares of forest destroyed in East
Kalimantan, smoke causing health problems over much of
Southeast Asia as far away as Singapore and Bangkok, and
carbon dioxide emissions estimated at 17% of total world-
wide carbon dioxide emissions in that year.
Eastern Kalimantan is also the location of most of
Indonesia's lucrative coal mines which supply much of
Indonesia's domestic power generation needs. In 2005,
about 152 million tons of coal were mined in Indonesia,
including exports of about 107 million tons valued at

about US$ 4 billion, which represented 21% of world
exports.
Recently, particularly in the past fi ve years, there has
been a vast land clearing programme associated with the
establishment of oil palm plantations and the associated
infrastructure. One source (Leslie Potter, Australian National
University) has estimated that 3.1 million hectares of land
have been cleared in East Kalimantan under the guise of
oil palm plantation development. While many of the oil
palm plantation areas have been established on land
that had been left in a seriously degraded condition as a
result of logging and fi res, other plantations have been
and are being established on forested areas, requiring new
campaigns of clear-felling and burning, prior to planting
of oil palms. It is ironic that the push for renewable
energy which has increased the demand for palm oil as a
renewable bio-fuel, is causing widespread environmental
damage and contributing to increased carbon dioxide
emissions.

Many species of plants and animals are considered to
be at risk due to these widespread reductions in natural
habitat, the most notable being the orangutan, whose
population in Kalimantan has declined substantially in
recent years. The population of orangutans declined by one
third as a result of forest fi res during 1997-98. Several
coal mining projects including the large Kaltim Prima Coal
Project are also located in orangutan territory. The areas
affected by mining are very small in comparison with
areas affected by logging, fi res and oil palm plantations.
However, mining companies provide easier targets for
NGOs seeking to protect the orangutan. Nevertheless, it
is apparent that mining companies have done more good
than harm in to the cause of orangutan conservation. For
example, during 1998, employees of PT Kaltim Prima Coal,
operator of the Kaltim Prima project, rescued dozens of
orangutan from forest fi res. The company has also been
cooperating with NGOs in the restoration of orangutan
habitat in the area.