Category Archives: Natural resources and development

‘This place used to be green’: the brutal impact of oil in the Niger Delta

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Bayelsa state once offered rich pickings for farmers and fisherman. Then oil companies arrived and wrought an environmental catastrophe

• All photographs by Arteh Odjidja, whose work features in the exhibition Rise for Bayelsa, which runs in London until 20 December 2019

Almost every day, Udengs Eradiri is informed of another oil spill in Bayelsa state, in the Niger Delta. Most of the time, little or nothing is done to clean up the mess, says Eradiri, the state’s commissioner for the environment.

“You just need to take a tour to understand the magnitude of the environmental abuse,” he adds. “[Bayelsa] used to be green, you could go to farm or fish. We used to have very impressive harvests. You would spend just an hour in the water and you have a lot of fish.”

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Kenya’s dispossessed seek redress for Britain’s ‘colonial injustices’

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People whose families were brutally evicted to make way for tea plantations are taking their case for restitution to the UN

The red, fertile earth glistens in the Kenyan sun. Here in the lush green of the tea plantation uplands of Kericho County are some of the most lucrative lands in Africa.

Theaceae trees with their leathery, serrated leaves stretch in every direction. They provide tea to Europeans, making millions for the multinational companies that operate in the region. Yet for 85-year-old Peter Torongei, and thousands like him, there is very little hope. His tin shack sits firmly in the area called “Squatters Land”.

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Honey project brings sweet success for families in Zambia

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Beehives built out of scrap wood in the country’s virgin forests have reaped rewards for 10,000 local families

A former hedge fund manager has become one of Africa’s most prolific single-source honey producers through a social enterprise that impacts thousands of families.

The Zambia-based organisation, Mama Buci – meaning “Mother Honey” in Bemba, the local language – was started 10 years ago by former trader Martin Zuch and has since grown to provide more than 10,000 families with income.

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Amazon fires are a shameful indictment of our lust for excess

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The flames engulfing the world’s biggest rainforest are a human tragedy as well as an environmental one. We are all to blame

The scale of the devastation caused by the wildfires still raging in the Amazon is hard to comprehend. This is a rainforest that provides one-fifth of the world’s oxygen; it is hard not to feel powerless and despairing in the face of the disaster overtaking the region.

But however strong – and bitter – the feeling about this as an environmental catastrophe, we must never lose sight of the fact that it is also a human tragedy.

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‘Most renewable energy companies’ linked with claims of abuses in mines

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Corporate watchdog urges clean-up of supply chains as analysis finds weak regulation and enforcement has led to lack of scrutiny

Most of the world’s top companies extracting key minerals for electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines have been linked with human rights abuses in their mines, research has found.

Analysis published by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), an international corporate watchdog, revealed that 87% of the 23 largest companies mining cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, nickel and zinc – the six minerals essential to the renewable energy industry – have faced allegations of abuse including land rights infringements, corruption, violence or death over the past 10 years.

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Nigerian officials ponder next move in $9bn energy scandal

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As war of words continues over potential loss of assets, mixed messages of negotiation and scam emanate from government

Nigeria’s top government officials have met to discuss their next move in the $9bn (£7.4bn) energy scandal that is poised to cost their economy dear.

As they exited Monday’s high-level meeting, chaired by vice-president Yemi Osinbajo, the participants remained tight-lipped, refusing to comment on the talks.

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Nigeria misses chance to transform lives – and must pay $9bn damages

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UK court ruling over aborted project means country will have to pay one-fifth of its foreign reserves to gas supply company

Nigeria’s government stands accused of letting down its 201 million residents by failing to complete a gas supply and production agreement that would have transformed their lives. Instead, the country will now have to pay $9bn (£7.4bn) in penalties or risk having its assets seized.

The accusation is being levied at the federal republic by lawyers representing Process and Industrial Developments Ltd (P&ID), a gas supply and engineering company, following a UK court ruling that paves the way for the seizure of assets belonging to Africa’s richest country. The extraordinary figure represents one-fifth of the country’s declared foreign reserves of $45bn.

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Forest twice size of UK destroyed in decade for big consumer brands – report

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Greenpeace estimates 50m hectares cleared by 2020, warning companies must evolve to prevent ‘climate breakdown’

An area twice the size of the UK has been destroyed for products such as palm oil and soy over the last decade, according to analysis by Greenpeace International.

In 2010, members of the Consumer Goods Forum, including some of the world’s biggest consumer brands, pledged to eliminate deforestation by 2020, through the sustainable sourcing of four commodities most linked to forest destruction: soya, palm oil, paper and pulp, and cattle.

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Holy and unholy waters: a tale of two Indian rivers

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While the Ganges is sacred but heavily polluted, the Chambal’s ‘cursed’ but pristine waters have proved a blessing for locals

Cold-blooded gharials, a crocodile-like species unique to south Asia, catch the last of the day’s warmth as a setting sun paints the sky crimson above the Chambal river.

Two jackals and a jungle cat scuttle up thorny ravines that box in the expansive blue water, while the orange-beaked Indian skimmer bird glides overhead.

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Fuel for thought: black market in petrol in Togo and Benin – in pictures

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For thousands of people in Benin and Togo, the illegal trade in fuel looted from oil-rich Nigeria offers a lifeline. The human impact of this lucrative dealing has been documented by Spanish photographer Antonio Aragón Renuncio, whose series on the subject – described by the judges as ‘brilliantly affecting’ – won him the 2019 London Business School photography award

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Dutch court will hear widows’ case against Shell over deaths of Ogoni Nine

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Judges order oil firm to release confidential documents as wives of late Nigerian activists get go-ahead to pursue claim

A Dutch court has ruled that it has jurisdiction to determine whether Royal Dutch Shell was complicit in the Nigerian government’s execution of the Ogoni Nine, environmental protesters who fought against widespread pollution in the Niger Delta.

In a 50-page ruling hailed by campaigners as an “important precedent” for global human rights cases, judges at The Hague’s district court said on Wednesday that they would allow the case to go forward, also indicating that the claimants – widows of four of the activists – would be able to bring further evidence to prove their case.

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Rotten eggs: e-waste from Europe poisons Ghana’s food chain

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Toxins from old computers, fridges and other electronic goods are polluting chicken eggs in an area where 80,000 people live

Some of the most hazardous chemicals on Earth are entering the food chain in Ghana from illegally disposed electronic waste coming from Europe.

According to a new report by two environmental groups tracking the disposal of e-waste, chicken eggs from the Agbogbloshie slum in Ghana’s capital, Accra – where residents break up waste to recover metals – contain dangerous levels of dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), among other harmful substances.

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‘You often get sick’: the deadly toll of illegal gold mining in South Africa | Christopher Clark

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Driven by need, tens of thousands of women are risking death, disease and sexual violence to scrape a living in the country’s informal mining sector

On the outskirts of Durban Deep, an abandoned mining town with a labyrinth of underground tunnels long since abandoned by the big gold companies, Elizabeth goes rhythmically about her work.

Grinding piles of rough stones into white, gold-flecked silt on a large concrete slab, the 40-year-old is one of the ghostly dust-covered zama zamas – artisanal miners, mostly illegal – who have turned to scavenging in disused gold and diamond mines across South Africa.

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‘An example to all’: the Mongolian herders who took on a corporate behemoth – and won

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Displaced from their land by multinational mining companies, nomadic herders defied the odds to preserve their heritage for future generations

All photographs by Susan Schulman

Just 10 years ago, the district of Khanbogd, in southern Mongolia’s Omnogovi province, was a barely known region of eastern Asia.

That changed with the discovery of gold and copper deposits below the seemingly endless Gobi desert, home to a community of herdsmen who had worked hard to make a living from this barren land. So when their government forged an agreement that threatened to deprive them of the land they had owned for generations, they fought back for their way of life, taking the mining giant Rio Tinto and others to court in order to safeguard their heritage.

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Chinese fishmeal plants leave fishermen in the Gambia all at sea | Hannah Summers

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Scientists and campaigners warn that factories in coastal villages are wreaking environmental and economic havoc

Before the arrival of fishmeal factories in the Gambia, Musa Duboe would catch red snapper and barracuda to be sold at the local market. But his income had begun to dwindle due to depleted stocks.

Then in 2016 the Chinese-owned fishmeal plant Golden Lead began operating out of the coastal town of Gunjur, increasing demand for fish to export for overseas aquaculture.

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Fires of Jharia spell death and disease for villagers

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The inhabitants of a remote village at the heart of India’s coal industry brave deadly sinkholes and toxic gases simply to survive

In the village of Liloripathra, in a remote corner of India’s eastern Jharkhand state, mother-of-three Sushila Devi grips the hands of two women sitting on either side of her. Coal fires spew clouds of smoke into the already heavy, polluted air.

At about 8pm, a policeman cradling a small body wrapped in black plastic bags emerges through the smoke and the crowds that have gathered around her home. He has come to deliver the body of her 13-year-old daughter Chanda, killed along with two others from the village when a coal mine caved in on top of them. They had been scavenging in a colliery operated by Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), a subsidiary of state-owned Coal India.

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Lethal landslips and drug addiction: Myanmar’s toxic jade trade

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A controversial new gemstone law fails to address the hazards of an industry in which scores of workers die each year

At one of the jade mining pits that scar the mountains of northern Myanmar’s Kachin state, a miner recalls how five of his friends died during a landslide two years ago. “I was so scared,” he says. While working in areas where there have been previous landslides, he says he has discovered dead bodies and buried them.

Testimonies heard by the Guardian reveal a deadly environment where lethal landslides and equipment failures strike regularly, in an industry with a history of human rights abuses, corruption and environmental destruction. “At first it was so scary for me,” says another worker. “But it’s becoming natural … We started accepting that we could die in any situation.”

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Ogoni widows testify at The Hague over Shell’s alleged complicity in killings

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Four Nigerian women bring landmark case over state executions of nine activists in a military court

Four Nigerian women at the centre of a long-running legal battle against oil giant Royal Dutch Shell saw their historic case reach the Hague on Tuesday.

The company is accused of complicity in the state execution of nine Ogoni protesters and human right abuses dating back to 1993. The allegations concern the 1990s violent government crackdown in Ogoniland, in the oil-rich Niger delta region, where oil spills inflicted environmental damage on a huge scale.

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The barefoot engineers of Malawi – in pictures

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Eight women from rural Malawi travelled to India to train as solar engineers. Now they are lighting the way for their communities, in a country where just 10% of households are powered by electricity

Photographs by Peter Caton/VSO

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Zambian villagers await outcome of UK mining firm’s pollution case appeal

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Vedanta Resources in fresh appeal to have water contamination claim brought by 1,800 people heard in Zambia

A British mining company has appealed to the supreme court to prevent 1,800 Zambian villagers bringing a pollution case involving its subsidiary from being tried in the UK.

Lawyers for Vedanta Resources told Britain’s highest court that the case – brought by villagers who allege that their land and livelihoods were destroyed by water contamination from Vedanta-owned Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) – should be heard in Zambia instead.

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