地质稀缺矿产资源的可持续利用外文文献

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Resources Policy journal homepage Normative principles and the sustainable use of geologically scarce mineral resources M L C M Henckensa C M J Ryngaertb 1 P P J Driessena E Worrella aUtrecht University Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development Heidelberglaan 2 3584 CS Utrecht The Netherlands bUtrecht University Faculty of Law Economics and Government The Netherlands A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords Scarce mineral resources Sustainable use Normative principles International agreement A B S T R A C T The use of geologically scarce mineral resources needs to be reduced substantially in order to prevent future generations from being deprived of them So far there has been no international reaction to this growing problem We argue that an international agreement on the sustainable use of geologically scarce mineral re sources is necessary and in particular that a number of normative principles of environmental governance as currently codifi ed in international environmental agreements require such an agreement 1 Introduction and methodology For more than a century the use of many non fossil mineral re sources has increased with annual growth percentages of up to 3 to 6 USGS 2015 Current levels of extraction of certain mineral resources might result in an availability problem for future generations Henckens et al 2014 Once the most accessible ores are exhausted humankind will increasingly become dependent on lower ore grades and more remote mines Not only the extraction costs will rise but the impact on the natural and human environment in terms of water use energy con sumption greenhouse gas production waste generation and landscape destruction will become higher to the extent that mineral ores become scarcer Environmental impact and exhaustion of minerals are closely interlinked According to Northey et al 2014 the critical issue for primary production of a metal may not be the availability of mineral deposits as such but rather economic and environmental issues asso ciated with exploiting remaining reserves In separate papers we came to the conclusion that an international agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of geologically scarce minerals is necessary to se cure that suffi cient scarce resources will be available for future gen erations Henckens et al 2016a 2016b The need for international cooperation regarding global management of scarce mineral resources is supported by e g Nickless 2017 Ali et al 2017 Bleischwitz 2012 Bleischwitz et al 2012 and Andrews Speed et al 2012 The goal of the present paper is to investigate whether such an in ternational agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of geo logically scarce mineral resources would also be necessitated by nor mative principles of environmental governance as they currently exist in international environmental agreements We consider normative principles as foundations of principled en vironmental governance While these principles are of an abstract nature we are particularly interested in them insofar as they have been legally codifi ed in international environmental agreements The legal nature of normative principles gives them a grounded character and adds a level of seriousness to proposed international policies i e ob jectives which the international community seeks to achieve Vice versa once a normative principle is broadly accepted as a foundation for international agreements its applicability to other yet non regu lated problems can be assessed That is what we do in this paper To this eff ect we will analyze in Section 3 and Section 4 which normative principles have so far provided a foundation to the major international agreements on natural resources The analysis will be based on the text of international environmental agreements and on literature The resulting inventory will provide us with a set of nor mative principles which could form the foundation of an agreement on the regulation of the extraction of geologically scarce mineral re sources In Sections 5 8 we will assess the applicability of four selected https doi org 10 1016 j resourpol 2018 08 007 Received 10 November 2017 Received in revised form 9 August 2018 Accepted 13 August 2018 This publication is partly based on chapter 8 and 9 of the Ph D thesis Managing Raw Materials Scarcity Safeguarding the availability of geologically scarce mineral resources for future generations of M L C M Henckens Utrecht University 17 October 2016 http dspace library uu nl handle 1874 339827 Corresponding author 1The contribution of Mr C Ryngaert to this publication has been funded by the European Research Council under the Starting Grant Scheme Proposal 336230 UNIJURIS and the Dutch Organization for Scientifi c Research under the VIDI Scheme Proposal 452 12 002 E mail address M L C M Henckens uu nl M L C M Henckens Resources Policy 59 2018 351 359 Available online 23 August 2018 0301 4207 2018 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved T normative principles to the problem of exhaustion of mineral resources In Section 9 we will draw conclusions First Section 2 contains an ex position of the problem of geological scarcity of mineral resources 2 Background Discussions on the geological scarcity of mineral resources and the consequences of unsustainable use are nothing new After infl uential publications of Malthus 1798 Ricardo 1817 and Mill 1848 on the limited capacity of the Earth to provide enough food and minerals to the world population and the warnings of the so called Conservation Movement in the USA between 1890 and 1920 Tilton 2001 new concerns on the long term availability of resources were raised after World War II in connection with the substantial resource use related to postwar reconstruction In the USA this led in 1952 to the creation of the President s Material Policy Commission or Paley Commission after its chairman Cooper 1975 One of the outcomes of the work of this Commission was the sponsoring of organizations and studies on growth and scarcity A very infl uential book within this framework was published by Barnett and Morse 1963 whose fi ndings and views on the relationship between economic growth and the depletion of nonrenewable resources stood in sharp contrast with those held previously The opinion of Barnett and Morse is that technological developments have completely compensated for increasingly scarce nonrenewable resources and can be expected to do so in future as well The strong potential of tech nology development to solve scarcity problems was also emphasized in books by Maurice and Smithson 1984 and Diamandis and Kotler 2012 In 1979 a number of scientists reconsidered and nuanced Barnett and Morse s optimistic vision presenting a spectrum of diff erent views on the subject of minerals scarcity Smith 1979 In 1972 contradicting Barnett and Morse Meadows et al published Limits to Growth for the so called Club of Rome coming to the conclusion that per capita food and industrial output would collapse as a result of ex haustionofmineralresourcesandenvironmentaldegradation Meadows et al 1972 In 1992 Meadows and his co authors updated their advice to the Club of Rome Meadows et al 1992 arguing along similar lines The above described diff erences of views on scarcity refl ect the discussion between the so called resource optimists and resource pes simists Tilton 2003 The resource pessimists support the so called fi xed stock paradigm The Earth is fi nite and so the amount of mineral resources is fi nite as well However demand will not stop growing so it is only a matter of time before supply cannot meet demand anymore On the other hand the resource optimists support the so called opportunity cost paradigm The optimists do not deny that mineral resources will deplete gradually but they have a strong belief that humanity will be able to cope with the eff ects of depletion When de mand outpaces supply the costs will rise and simultaneously the pressure to fi nd substitutes or alternatives for the depleted mineral According to the resource optimists the market will automatically solve the problem While not denying this point of view the pessimists on the other hand are of the opinion that humanity should not deliber ately deprive future generations from resources regardless of whether or not they could be replaced by alternative resources new discoveries could potentially result in the situation that a geologically scarce re source may become very important or even essential for next genera tions Hence resources have an intrinsic value for future generations Furthermore exhaustion of a mineral resource and the environ mental impact of its mining are closely interlinked A decrease of the ore grade leads to a higher energy and water use and waste production A signifi cant increase of the environmental impact of the extraction of a mineral resource is a symptom of exhaustion of that resource Harmsen et al 2013 show that a factor 2 decrease of the copper grade results roughly in a two fold increase of the Gross Energy Requirement Ac cording to Swart and Dewulf 2013 the exhaustion of ores is not caused by lack of ore but by changing ore characteristics i e ore grade and ore depth The lower the ore grade the more ore needs to be ex tracted to produce 1kg of metal Energy requirements water use and waste production are directly connected to the ore grade The world does not run out of elements as such but certain resource reserves may become so low graded so deep so remote that the costs and related the environmental impacts of their extraction may become prohibitive According to Mason et al 2011 the extractability of a resource is determined by three criteria 1 the availability of the resource con sidering its geological characteristics and geographical distribution 2 society s addiction to the resource meaning the impact of a sig nifi cant decline in the resource s availability to manufacturers and consumers taking into consideration the extent to which the aff ection of existing economic social and environmental systems will be accepted by society and 3 available alternatives substitutability and recycl ability In order to ensure that future generations keep suffi cient access to primary minerals without being confronted with severe environmental impacts it is essential that they are extracted at a sustainable rate An important question in this context is how large the Extractable Global Resources EGR of a given mineral are We have assessed the quantity of extractable mineral resources in the Earth s crust on the basis of two diff erent approaches in the litera ture The extractable global resources according to an approach of a working group of the International Resources Panel of UNEP 2011 The extractable global resources according to an approach derived from Rankin 2011 p 303 Thetwoapproachesarepresentedandelaboratedinthe Supplementary information Additionally we have taken into account two diff erent growth scenarios for raw materials production Scenario 1 the annual production increase of raw materials be tween 2015 and 2050 is equal to their annual production increase be tween 1980 and 2015 the annual production increase between 2050 and 2100 is assumed to be half of the 2015 2050 production increase after 2100 no further production increase is assumed Scenario 2 the annual production increase of raw materials be tween 2015 and 2100 is equal to their annual production increase be tween 1980 and 2015 the annual production increase between 2100 and 2200 is assumed to be half of the 2015 2050 production increase after 2200 no further production increase is assumed For both scenarios we have calculated the time period within which the extractable amount of 33 mineral resources is exhausted The combination of the two estimates for the extractable global resources and the two growth scenarios lead to four outcomes for the depletion period Table 1 presents an indicative optimistic estimate of the ex haustion period after 2015 of the considered raw materials For further details we refer to the Supplementary information The main conclusion of our assessment regarding potential scarcity of raw materials remains the same for many mineral resources deple tion is not imminent but for some mineral resources it is relatively nearby A sensitivity analysis shows that even with eleven times larger amounts of extractable resources as compared to the UNEP approach the extractable amounts of fi ve raw materials may still be exhausted within 100 years after 2015 under the assumed scenarios gold anti mony copper chromium and zinc For the details of the sensitivity analysis it is referred to the Supplementary information Additionally it should be taken into consideration that the dis tribution of raw materials consumption over the countries in the world is very unequal currently The average citizen in industrialized coun tries consumes fi ve times as much as the average world citizen and ten times as much as the average citizen in poor countries Halada et al 2008 If such unequal distribution is considered to be unsustainable in M L C M Henckens et al Resources Policy 59 2018 351 359 352 the long term and the consumption of raw materials per capita in the diff erent countries of the world is supposed to become more equal then industrialized countries need to make an extra eff ort A global reduction of the extraction rate of a raw material of e g 50 means that in dustrialized countries have to reduce their consumption of raw mate rials with 90 compared to their current consumption in order to allow poor countries to catch up So even under very optimistic assumptions the undisputable con clusion is that if humanity wants to conserve the scarcest mineral re sources for future generations in all countries of the world reduction measures must be taken for these resources especially in industrialized countries 3 Existing agreements For the short term in view of uncertain future crisis situations some governments have decided to strategically stockpile certain raw materials In EU Directive 2009 119 EC EU Member States are obliged to maintain minimum stocks of crude oil and or petroleum products EU 2009 After the end of World War I the government of the USA started considering whether to maintain strategic stocks of a number of materials The fi rst strategic stockpiling in the USA was established in 1938 Chappel 2016 Many governments including the European Union Germany France Finland the Netherlands USA Canada Japan Korea and Taiwan prepared strategies based on so called cri ticality studies on the short term availability of materials which are critical for the economy Department for Environment Food and Rural Aff airs 2012 The background of these strategies is principally geo political the fear that monopolist producers might deliberately stop or reduce the production and delivery of certain materials for political or fi nancial reasons However for the long term despite the depletion of geologically scarce mineral resources no government has taken action thus far nor has an internationally binding agreement limiting the extraction of geologically scarce mineral resources ever materialized According to Brilha et al 2018 the abiotic natural resources are persistently ne glected in international and national politics Nevertheless some in ternational declarations and charters have directly addressed depletion of mineral resources Thus the Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm Declaration 1992 provides in Principle 5 that t he non renewable resources of the earth must be employed in such a way as to guard against the danger of their future exhaustion and to ensure that benefi ts from such employment are shared by all mankind The UN World Charter for Nature 1982 for its part provides in Principle II d that n on renewable resources which are consumed as they are used shall be exploited with restraint taking into account their abundance the rational possibilities of converting them for consumption and the compatibility of their exploitation with the functioning of natural systems Finally the UNESCO Earth Charter 2000 calls in Principle II 5 f on the international community to manage the extrac tion and use of non renewable resources such as minerals and fossil fuels in ways that minimize depletion and cause no serious environmental damage The 25 9 2015 Resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes Sustainable De velopment Goal 12 2 by 2030 achieve the sustainable management and effi cient use of natural resources While these declarations have not yet paved the way for the adop tion of binding international agreements on the depletion of geologi cally scarce mineral resources the normative principles which they contain remain relevant in the context of this paper because they might inform future customary and treaty law specifi cally aimed at reg ulating mineral resources depletion Additionally there are some international agreements that address the exploitation although not the scarcity or depletion of mineral re sources namely the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea UNCLOS 1982 the Protocol on Environmental protection to the Antarctic Treaty 1991 and the Agreement governing the Activities of States on the Moon and other Celestial Bodies 1979 However these agreements are limited to areas outside national jurisdiction There have also been international agreements on the conservation and pro tection of specifi c renewable resources such as biodiversity endangered fi sh species wild fl ora and fauna and tropical timber the Convention for the conservation of Antarctic Seals 1972 the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals 1979 the Convention on Biological Diversity 1992 the Convention on the Conservation and Management of the Highly Migratory Fish Stocks on the Western and Centra