Some four months after the Commission of Appointments rejected Gina Lopez as secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, the dust has arguably settled a bit with the beleaguered mining industry in a good position to take stock of things and move forward.
Now is the right time to define, once and for all, what responsible mining really means in the Philippines and in the process transform the much-maligned mining sector into a self-regulating industry that enforces compliance—encourages over-compliance, even—to environmental and safety standards.
This was proposed in the paper “Mining in the Philippines: Problems and Suggested Solutions” by Dr. Carlo Arcilla of the UP National Institute of Geological Sciences, commissioned by the international think tank Stratbase ADR Institute.
The mining audit, for instance, which some said Lopez arbitrarily wielded, could in fact be used in a constructive manner. It can be the starting point in a developing a new set of tools in the envisioned regime of self-policing among mining companies, all guided by the full implementation of the mining law.
A viable model is TSM—“Towards Sustainable Mining”—a set of protocols adopted by the Mining Association of Canada and which President Rodrigo Duterte once cited. The award-winning performance system is a set of tools and indicators that allow mining firms to regulate themselves even as they manage risks and drive performance improvements.
Building trust with so-called communities of interest is central to this model, and TSM includes a number of checks and balances to ensure that reported results present an accurate picture of each facility’s management systems and performance.
The operational areas that TSM looks into include Aboriginal, in our case Indigenous People and Community Outreach, Safety and Health, Crisis Management and Communications Planning, Biodiversity Conservation Management, Tailings Management, Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Management.
This robust system is then complemented by external verification, in which a Verification Service Provider reviews a company’s self-assessment every three years to determine if there is evidence to support the performance ratings that it had reported.
There is both rigor and flexibility in this model, as the external verification strictly applies the protocols but can also change the ratings to ensure they accurately reflect the facility’s management practices and performance.
For Dr. Arcilla, he urges a drastic shift in the way the sector is managed in the Philippine context. For instance, he identified areas for improvement in the way the government via the DENR and mining firms approach projects in terms of monitoring environmental compliance and in national-local revenue sharing.
This inadequate cooperation, he pointed out, has resulted in the failure to maximize opportunities in exotic minerals and the production of higher-value mining products.
The solution can come in the form of, firstly, empowering agencies like the Mines and Geosciences Bureau and the Environmental Management Bureau and pouring more funds to mining science-related research. While he believes the two agencies have to be eventually separated, both have to be staffed with the best-paid people. Get the best talent of the land!
An independent and empowered EMB can guard against environmentally non-viable projects from even beginning, unlike the current set-up in which the DENR performs the contradictory functions of permit-giving and policing.
He also backed the long-proposed reforms in existing revenue-sharing schemes. Rightly, the share of mining revenues must shift in favor of local host communities, which are often remote and therefore outside the reach of social services.
Local governments and the Chamber of Mines have long decried the damaging inefficiency of remitting all mining taxes to the national treasury first and instead advocated the direct payment of taxes to them. This will enable the host LGUs and citizens to immediately appreciate the developmental impact of mining.
Dr. Arcilla writes: “Mining is important, as what cannot be grown has to be mined. Mining products pervade our daily lives and cannot be avoided without a lifestyle (very abrupt!) change. Responsible mining is possible, but it will require self-policing among mining companies and vigorous and complete implementation of mining law by government agencies.”
These and other reforms should put into good use the recent attention that mining companies have received. Following the highly dramatic episodes leading to the appointment of the new DENR Secretary, it’s time for the mining sector to sober up and do the spade work, as it were. The timing is right to cleanse their ranks, exceed compliance, and demonstrate conclusively that responsible mining in the country is indeed possible.