Can mining, sustainable development and mitigating effects of climate change be mutually inclusive? A reflection on South Africa’s situation

Abstract

Central to Sustainable Development (SD) is the improvement of people’s welfare in perpetuity SD is based on the understanding that development of any country depletes a country’s resources needed to sustain it Implementation of development initiatives often has unintended negatives developing over time such as climate change Achieving higher levels of economic growth is a necessarily but not sufficient condition for SD To achieve SD, natural-resource rich countries have to exploit these resources to trigger the required economic growth! Exploiting the natural resources is inherently non-sustainable