WHC slams SA for mining at heritage site

The UN World Heritage Committee has slammed South Africa for allowing an opencast coal mine, owned by Coal of Africa, at the 1100-year-old Kingdom of Mapungubwe World Heritage Site.

A report tabled at the annual World Heritage Committee meeting this week warnsearch for used crushers south africas that opencast coal mining by the Australian company poses a “major threat” to the integrity of Mapungubwe and could result in “unacceptable and irreversible damage” to huge strips of land in the vicinity.

The committee will be calling on South Africa’s government to explain this decision as a matter of urgency.

The site is protected by an international convention because of its “outstanding universal value”. Mapungubwe is an ancient stone citadel kingdom dating from around AD900 and is located on the country’s northern border with Botswana and Zimbabwe.

An expert monitoring team, which visited Mapungubwe earlier this year at the request of the UN World Heritage Committee warned that there was no effective way to mitigate the impacts of large-scale opencast mining by Coal of Africa, which would lead to “a highly detrimental impact” on the value of the Mapungubwe landscape.

They noted with concern that the Department of Mineral Resources recently authorised more than 20 other mine prospecting leases for coal, petroleum and gas in the area, and the South African government appeared to have ignored previous pleas to put the mining on hold by quietly giving the nod to the Australian company to carry on mining.

The monitoring team included Lazare Eloundou, chief of the Africa Unit of Unesco’s World Heritage Centre, and Dag Avango, a history researcher from the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology.

They were surprised to find that the Australian coal mining plant was 95% complete, despite an official government assurance that mining had been halted.

They were also handed lengthy protest notes from several cultural groups, which complained they had not been consulted properly by the government or the Australians.

Eloundou and Avango noted the committee had asked South Africa to wait on mine development until a more thorough heritage impact assessment was compiled. But when they visited the site it became “crystal clear” that the Australian company had resumed its operations and stockpiled large volumes of coal.

The monitoring team was also critical of the findings of the belated heritage impact assessment, which seemed to take the view that there was no possibility of protecting some of the archaeological sites other than by fencing off, recording and then “destroying them”.

Some of the statements made in the heritage report, which was financed by the company, diminished its legitimacy and also “call its objectivity into question”.

The monitoring team report is due to be presented later this week to the UN World Heritage Committee in St Petersburg, Russia, along with a draft recommendation urging South Africa to halt any further opencast coal mining in the area.

Instead, the mining company will likely be asked to sacrifice some of its profits by using more expensive, underground mining techniques.

Landscape around Mapungubwe would suffer “major devastation” from opencast mining and would be transformed into a “vast industrial landscape”.