Mine land rehabilitation in Brazil: Goals and techniques in the context of legal requirements

Abstract

Environmental legislation in many countries demands the rehabilitation of degraded areas to minimize environmental impacts. Brazilian laws require the restitution of self-sustaining ecosystems to historical conditions but ignore the emergence of novel ecosystems due to large-scale changes, such as species invasions, extinctions, and land-use or climate changes, although these novel ecosystems might fulfill ecosystem services in similar ways as historic ecosystems. Thorough discussions of rehabilitation goals, target ecosystems, applied methods, and approaches to achieving mine land rehabilitation, as well as dialogues about the advantages and risks of chemical inputs or non-native, non-invasive species that include all political, economic, social, and academic stakeholders are necessary to achieve biological feasibility, sociocultural acceptance, economic viability, and institutional tractability during environmental rehabilitation. Scientific knowledge of natural and rehabilitating ecosystems is indispensable for advancing these discussions and achieving more sustainable mining. Both mining companies and public institutions are responsible for obtaining this knowledge.

Land Cover Changes in Open-Cast Mining Complexes Based on High-Resolution Remote Sensing Data

“…The exploitation of mineral reserves should be embedded in efficient and responsible management plans that have a strong focus on the development of neighboring communities and sustainable land use. This balancing act has led to the emergence of environmental regulations in many countries, including Brazil [2], and a series of self-commitments by the mining industry [3,4].…”

Integrating Environmental Variables by Multivariate Ordination enables the Reliable Estimation of Mineland Rehabilitation Status

“…The environmental rehabilitation of mining areas, which is intended to restitute ecosystems and their functionality to as close as possible to premining levels to reduce the overall impacts of mining operations (Perring et al, 2013), is affected by a myriad of forces operating at multiple spatiotemporal scales (Arroyo-Rodríguez et al, 2017;Ren et al, 2017). The monitoring of rehabilitation success and the definition of effective indicators of rehabilitation status are necessary for monitoring whether rehabilitation goals are achieved (Gastauer et al, 2018a;Latawiec and Agol, 2016). Moreover, monitoring can guarantee institutional tractability of rehabilitation activities (Lamb et al, 2015) and may produce positive feedback for environmental rehabilitation practices (Lechner et al, 2018).…”

Land Cover Changes in Open-Cast Mining Complexes Based on High-Resolution Remote Sensing Data

“…On the other hand, the exploitation of mineral reserves should be embedded in efficient, responsible management plans that have a strong focus on the development of neighboring communities and sustainable land use. This balancing act has led to the emergence of environmental regulations in many countries, including Brazil [2], and to a series of self-commitments by the mining industry [3,4].…”

“…The four pillars of the mitigation hierarchy process increase environmental sustainability by avoiding net losses or generating positive impacts [10,11] as well as by increasing social acceptance of mining [12]. Remediation includes the revegetation, i.e., greening, and the progressive environmental rehabilitation of degraded, damaged or destroyed mine lands to achieve pre-mining levels of biodiversity, ecosystem structure and ecosystem functioning [2]. Such mine land rehabilitation remains challenging, especially in tropical ecosystems, as issues related to species selection, biological invasions, and monitoring the effectiveness of rehabilitation activities are not fully resolved [13].…”