Environmental offsets made by mining companies to justify the damage done by their projects will be the subject of a Senate inquiry established on Wednesday. Offsets, such as buying up and protecting “like for like” habitats of equivalent size to that used by a proposed mine, are a legal requirement for securing government approval of mining projects. The inquiry, passed by the Greens with Labor’s support, will scrutinise the process by which offset schemes are developed and monitored, and whether the environmental outcomes promised by mining companies are actually achieved. “Not only are offsets often magic pudding calculations to justify irreversible environmental damage, there’s also hardly any enforcement of whether offsets are met,” the Greens senator Larissa Waters said. “Often these offsets are so unrealistic that they’re impossible to deliver on.” Among the environmental offsets under Senate scrutiny include controversial projects in Queensland of dredging at Abbot Point, an LNG export facility at Curtis Island and a coal mine in the Galilee Basin. Offsets granted for the China First mine proposed by Clive Palmer’s Waratah Coal that will affect the Bimblebox Nature Refuge will also be looked at. Last year a court overturned the NSW government’s approval for the expansion of Rio Tinto’s Warkworth coal mine, in part citing the fact that the habitats to be protected in exchange for the damage caused by the mine were not an ecological match for the endangered woodlands that would be lost. “It is not appropriate to trade offsets across different ecological communities. Where a project impacts on a specific ecological community, any offset must relate to that same ecological community which is impacted,” the judge said. The inquiry will report by 16 June, just weeks before new senators, including from the Palmer United party, take their seats. theguardian/world/2014/mar/05/senate-inquiry-to-investigate-use-of-environmental-offsets-in-mining-projects
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 02:35:01 +0000
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