Coal divestment – where does the environmental buck stop when the bucks stop rolling in?
On 14 February 2022, at the Khwezela Colliery in Mpumalanga, acid water flowed through a broken concrete seal in an old mine shaft and into the nearby Kromdraai spring. The acid plume killed thousands of fish as well as other aquatic life before finally being diluted in the Loskop Dam 60km downstream.
The burning of coal for energy releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This has understandably led people who are serious about climate change to call for divesting coal energy and mining.
In the case of divesting coal mining, however, there are two problems: the first is that a mining company’s divestment of coal mines does not mean that coal stops being mined and burnt; the second is that even if coal mining stops tomorrow, the environmental impacts of coal mining will continue, unless these are actively and thoughtfully remediated and the land rehabilitated.