The rejection of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) last 9 January 2012 of the Environmental Compliance Certificate (ECC) application filed by Sagittarius Mines, Inc (SMI) for the US$5.9 billion Tampakan Copper-Gold Project in southern Mindanao presents a good opportunity to ask questions and challenge Philippine society on the role of mining and in handling a situation like Tampakan.

In its website, Xstrata Copper, with headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, is described as one of the commodity business units within the major global diversified mining group Xstrata plc, with mining and metallurgical operations and development projects in eight countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Peru, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and the USA.

Xstrata Copper holds 62.5% of the Tampakan project, managed through SMI while Indophil Resources NL, a publicly listed company in Australia, owns 37.5% of the Tampakan Project.

Does the Philippine government's "no" also mean a "yes?"

DENR's denial of the ECC application, undertaken by its Environmental Management Bureau (EMB), will remain so "until the issues and concerns on the use of open pit mining method shall have been clarified and resolved by the company with the provincial government of South Cotabato." This meant that SMI would now have to deal with the environmental code enacted in July 2011 under then Governor Daisy Avance-Fuentes and now upheld by Governor Arthur Pingoy banning open-pit mining in the province.

Before this, national government officials, including Interior and Local Government Secretary Jessie Robredo, were actively pressuring local officials to repeal the decision on the grounds that the Mining Act of 1995, a national law, should prevail over local policies. This "bullying" was discussed in previous ESSC editorials.

Both the Arroyo and Aquino administrations showcased mining as the economy's new "winner," touting the Tampakan Copper-Gold Project as a flagship project. The largest foreign investment in the country at US$ 5.9 billion, it was supposed to provide 9,000 jobs during the construction phase and 2,000 jobs during the regular phase, plus billions of pesos in taxes each year.

In the cycle of political transitions and shifts of power, there is a value in the stretching of one's patience and one's financial ability to wait until a "friendlier" administration is lodged. Thus, the "seasonal" decision-making on the part of government is taken squarely and factored as part of the business cycle that sometimes you're up and sometimes you're down, so to speak

Is there a growing basis globally for re-assessing mining?

In DENR's denial of the ECC application, SMI may take comfort not only in what was said, but even more so in what was not said. Indeed, as pointed out by some oppositors to the Tampakan project as well as SMI officials, both the President and DENR themselves have not questioned, at least until now, the environmental merits of the project. In a press release, SMI President Peter Forrestal complained, "We are concerned this decision was not made on the merits of our Mine Project Environmental Impact Statement (EIS)..." SMI's Australian parent company, Indophil, added that in fact, DENR's Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Review Committee confirmed that its EIA was "robust and comprehensive."

Another factor behind the DENR decision that is critical but remained unsaid is the massive, growing public opposition to the project, specifically from farmers' and indigenous groups, church organizations, scientists, and environmentalists. The national government decision reveals that in its estimate, the SMI has yet to adequately convince people in southern Mindanao that the SMI would protect rather than harm their environment and livelihood.

The potential impacts of the Tampakan Copper-Gold project are complex as they are enormous, mainly dealing with the onsite people, the vegetation and soil, and the water cycle in the site and the surrounding areas to be affected.

For the South Cotabato provincial government, the ban on the use of open-pit mining technology in their environmental code is premised on the potential impact of mining on water source quality and availability and is the core concern. In northern Peru, there is an ongoing protest of the US$ 4.8 billion Conga gold project in Cajamarca, partly organized by the regional government. The Peruvian company Buenaventura and the US firm Newmont are the majority shareholders. The threat to local water supplies is fueling the protest.

The Tampakan project site straddles four provinces: South Cotabato (Tampakan), Sarangani (Malungon), Sultan Kudarat (Columbio), and Davao del Sur (Kiblawan). Its concession under the Financial or Technical Assistance Agreement covers roughly 23,600 hectares.

The copper-gold deposit is also vaunted to be world's fourth largest and Southeast Asia's biggest undeveloped at 2.4 billion tons, containing 13.5 million tons of copper and 15.8 million ounces of gold. The project lies at the southern end of the Central Mindanao Cordillera within the trans-Mindanao Cotabato Fault Zone. It is also nestled in the heart of the Cotabato watershed system, which includes Mount Matutum, Marbel and Koronadal watersheds. Specifically, the deposit is located on a ridge marking the watershed divide between the Pula Bato River to the west and the Tukay Mal and Bong Mal Rivers to the east. Twelve kilometers south from the deposit is the 2,293-meter high Mount Matutum, an active volcano. The Mount Matutum watershed was declared a protected landscape by presidential proclamation as far back as 1995.

As early as 2003, the World Resources Institute, ESSC, and other organizations prepared the publication Mining and critical ecosystems: mapping the risks, a pioneering study to systematically assess and map global indicators of ecosystems and communities that are vulnerable to negative impacts.

The maps prepared by ESSC as part of the Philippine case study show that what is now the Tampakan project site belongs to an area of high ecological values (which comprise protected areas, primary forests, mangroves, and UNESCO World Heritage Sites), high groundwater vulnerability (very likely affecting groundwater quantity and quality), medium-high vulnerability to watershed stress, medium social vulnerability (based on functional literacy, welfare and NGO/people's organization membership), and high seismic risk.

The project plan is to clear 3,935 hectares of forest that includes old-growth or primary rainforests. This will immediately displace a community of 4,000 indigenous B'laan people. Moreover, it will remove topsoil and destroy wildlife in an area with high unique biodiversity, with over 1,000 floral species and 280 recorded fauna species, of which 30% are endemic to the Philippines, and over 50 species are already under threat of extinction. The excavation itself will break into, disrupt, de-water and degrade the aquifer in the area.

Here, the company is to construct its massive open pit, 500 hectares wide and 800 meters deep. In this clearing, it will also store 1.35 billion tons of waste rock storage in a dump that also covers 500 hectares and is 300 meters high. In addition, a two-kilometer, 280-meter high dam to contain 1.1 billion tons of tailings will also be built in the site, together with a 40-kilometer pipeline conveyor system to Malalag, Davao del Sur, where a coal-fired power plant and port will be put up.

The power plant alone using the dirtiest and most pollutant fossil fuel raises pollution and health risks against residents as well as farmers practicing aquaculture and the biodiversity of a marine sanctuary in the Malalag Bay.

According to the Indophil website, "Perhaps one of the most significant elements in the Tampakan ore is arsenic which occurs in the copper-arsenic mineral enargite that is recovered together with other copper minerals in the sulphide flotation process." There is therefore high risk for pollution of ground and surface water with arsenic but also with other toxic chemicals as sulfuric acid and cyanide through tailing dams and waste-rock piles via a process called acid drainage. A study by scientist M. Williams in 2001 found arsenic pollution of surface and ground water to be common in copper-gold mines in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Arsenic pollution causes cancer, skin, lung and heart diseases and even deaths by poisoning.

It could likely pollute water draining into a tributary of Mal River, the region's biggest river system that partly flows into the Davao Gulf through Malalag Bay, as well as five other rivers, namely, the Altayan, Dalal, Manit, Manteo and Taplan.

The project is also slated to construct one large dam each in the Mal and Tapian rivers to extract freshwater for the mine. Both the pollution and extraction of these river waters could disrupt and harm the quantity and quality of irrigation water supply and livelihood of more than 100,000 farmers in Davao del Sur, Sultan Kudarat, and the rest of Mindanao's food basket.

What then should determine a "go" and a "no-go" in pursuing and developing mineral and other resource extraction?

The risks posed in the Tampakan Copper-Gold project are magnified by a worst-case scenario. Even in the EIA of SMI, it admits that "there is a high potential for loss of life and severe environmental damage if the tailings dam or rock storage facility collapses." A number of scientists who have studied the Tampakan project believe that this is quite likely, given the 16 cases of collapse of tailings dams in the Philippines in recent years. The project site is highly vulnerable, they argue, to earthquakes or extreme rainfall due to climate change that could cause tailing dams and waste-rock piles to collapse and result in deadly, catastrophic flows of 2.5 billion tons or even more of toxic material into rivers, bays and communities.

Overall, it appears that the ecological risks and values were either underestimated or underplayed in the feasibility studies of SMI. This seems to be the drift of the Indophil description of the choice of technology: "Preliminary `order-of-magnitude` financial modeling of the options indicates that a large open pit with certain assumptions in respect of the marketability provided the most viable economic outcome." In short, profit considerations were paramount to the exclusion of environmental factors,

Indeed, so much is at stake in the decisions that eventually have to be made in the Tampakan open-pit mining project. Or will we follow the shunting politics, saying yes when we mean no, and saying no when we mean yes? Where dominoes fall we will not know but in the end, mining wins the game?

The DENR decision did not settle nor resolve the Tampakan situation and will still be a major agenda in 2012. Internationally, there is a growing call for government capacity to monitor and report. For Xstrata, Indophil, and SMI, there is a need to re-assess their hydrological estimation of the project, as climatic events are showing us that more likely, a typhoon will pass through southern Mindanao. In early December 1910, a typhoon passed very near Davao and Mati. The destruction was considerable and Zamboanga also suffered great loss. With the variance in weather today, this is not unlikely to happen again. The possibility of a "Sendong" rainfall intensity and duration to flow through southern Mindanao will challenge the capacity to manage the mine, requiring new sets of hydrological standards and major revisions and reviews.