A Review of Mining Regulations and Environmental Sustainability of Artisanal Gold Mining Sector

Abstract

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining imparts on economic development more significantly in developing countries, but it is also responsible for serious environmental deterioration and human health concerns. Despite, the robust environmental legislations focused at mitigating the pernicious environmental and human health effects, little attention has been given to integration of environmental sustainability concepts into these regulations. This paper aims at addressing this gap by utilizing a systematic literature review methodology to analyze regulatory gaps and identify areas for improvement for integration of sustainable development. This study employed a systematic review designed to identify published scholarly studies on artisanal gold mining regulations for their effectiveness on environmental sustainability in the ASGM sector. A total of 159 papers were retrieved from the selected databases, 41 passed the inclusion criteria after a conscientious data analysis forming the evidence synthesis. After a rigorous data analysis, we find that the existing literature on ASGM regulations, largely do not systematically integrate critical issues of environmental sustainability. We found that, the regulations have concentrated on effects of chemicals such as mercury and cyanide mining technologies to minimize pollution and environmental assessments, while at the same time failing to address regulatory components of social issues, lack environmental incentives for the poor miners to improve production, lack of alternative technologies, lack of social securities, economic incentives and relevant trainings and awareness creation on health and safety which will continue to motivate unsustainable operations. It is thus strongly proposed that environmental sustainability concepts should be systematically and simultaneously integrated into ASGM regulations and policies in order to promote community livelihoods while protecting the environment from its rudimentary activities. The existing literature on ASGM regulations is unsystematic and inconsistent with most of it failing to fully address environmental sustainability challenges

Assessing Social and Environmental Impacts of Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining Practices in Lolgorian, Kenya

“…The information gathered was analyzed with the SPSS version 26.0. Descriptive statistics were used to examine the demographic profile of the respondents, which included (Tampushi et al, 2021) gender, age, origin, marital status, education, years of mining experience, and mining category. Regression analysis, including tests for normality, goodness of fit, and model fitting, was done, and the results of hypothesis testing performed using Ordinal Regression analysis were also reported.…”

“…This will make environmental sustainability more challenging because the lack of environmental impact assessment studies will limit other components such as environmental monitoring and spatial planning for specified ASGM areas (Morrison-Saunders et al, 2015). Despite having strict rules, this is an indicator of insufficient institutional capacities in charge of enforcement (Tampushi et al, 2021).…”