Brandon Marc Finn and Patrick Brandful Cobbinah argue that in the DR Congo, industrial mining companies and political elites operate under the banner of decarbonization while perpetuating historic injustices.
By Brandon Marc Finn and Patrick Brandful Cobbinah
Decarbonization is a major response to climate change mitigation in the 21st century. However, our research in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) shows that the pursuit of decarbonization is building on and recreating colonial inequalities. We urgently need to understand these inequalities and address them adequately. Such disparities are rife in the mining industry for critical minerals in Africa.
Recent online footage of a hillside collapse at a mining location in the southern DRC illustrates the working conditions of many miners who source the minerals fundamental to decarbonization around the world. This event is part of a broader dynamic unfolding in the country at the nexus of mining, poverty, and neocolonialism.
The working people in DRC sustaining the green transition are being displaced, suffering severe health and environmental consequences, and risking their lives to meet the global demand for critical minerals. Some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people are exposed to extreme pollution and dust levels because of decarbonization-related mining with limited governmental regulation. Indigenous communities across the globe are losing access to their land to enable mining companies’ access to industrial concessions.
Mining for critical minerals such as cobalt in the DRC presents this example. The world urgently needs cobalt and copper for electric vehicle batteries. However, meeting this demand currently rests on dispossessing local people from their communities and land, paying workers poverty wages, and turning a blind eye to the social and economic conditions that make child labor a necessary condition of survival for families in countries like the DRC.
Mining corporations and governments often demonize ordinary people working as artisanal and small-scale (ASM) miners for risking their lives to source the supply of minerals that we all need in society. We are confronted with stories about child labor and ASM in the DRC and other countries, including Colombia and Ghana. These are real concerns that need empathetic solutions. However, in thinking through these problems, we must also consider why people endure these working conditions as their best and often only survival strategy.
Our academic paper on the DRC’s mining history demonstrates why these conditions exist today and who is implicated in them. Belgian colonial control of the region in the early 20th century worked to disrupt existing social conditions and recruit labor to extract copper to meet the world’s booming demands for electricity supply. This process displaced communities and forced them into work in mines so that they could pay the taxes imposed on them in a foreign currency. Colonial violence and coercion were a key characteristic of this process.
The same region that was a leader in global copper supply in the early 20th century provided some of the uranium used in the atomic bombs dropped by the US on Japan in 1945. The leading Belgian copper mining company owned the uranium mining concession that enabled the Manhattan Project. During this time, mining uranium by hand was common and documented, and state-mandated child labor was enshrined in law. More than 60 years since the DRC’s independence, these conditions persist today and are being recreated to satisfy the world’s mineral demand for the green transition.
ASM miners are linked to cobalt extraction’s environmental and social harms. We show how these challenges are related to international industrial mining companies and Congolese political elites and do not act separately from these more powerful actors. The mining landscape in the DRC and its associated environmental degradation, dispossession, and economic inequality are new forms of old colonial practices.
Swiss company Glencore, the world’s largest commodity trader, was required to pay $1.1 billion in restitution after a decade-long international corruption charge found them guilty of bribery and market manipulation. In the DRC alone, Glencore paid $27.5 million to public officials to secure favorable mining conditions. Chinese state-backed company CMOC agreed to pay $800 million to settle a dispute over its copper and cobalt operations in the DRC. CMOC also relocated communities to access ore deposits without adequate compensation. Are these the companies we want leading perhaps the world’s most significant transformation in the 21st century?
Mining companies like Glencore and CMOC are fundamental to this green transition and, like other multi-billion dollar operators, are trying to frame themselves as its leaders. We indeed need industrial mining operations to provide the minerals to sustain low-carbon technologies. However, these mining companies have not taken their corporate social responsibility seriously, which is compounding inequalities and poverty in the world’s most vulnerable regions.
Decarbonization arguably offers the best chance to limit climate change’s devastating impacts. However, achieving a fossil fuel-free future does not equate to an inherently just one. We cannot continuously ignore the current processes that enable decarbonization just because we want to decarbonize.
We can support decarbonization while urgently bringing attention to actually existing neocolonialism through industrial exploitation. Colonialism persists because its history provides the backdrop for industrial mining companies and local political elites to operate under the rubric of decarbonization while perpetuating injustice.
If we are concerned with making the green transition just, we must consider two imperatives on geography and history. We must consider where the resources we need for decarbonization come from and whether this process relies on and recreates histories of oppression and dispossession to access them. Equitable mining practices and decarbonization supply chains can only be achieved by addressing the current inequalities which are built on the DRC’s past.
Dr. Brandon Marc Finn is a research faculty member at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Dr. Finn directs the Informal Sustainability Lab and leads ongoing work on copper and cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo and electronic waste recycling and urban poverty in Ghana.
Associate Professor Patrick Brandful Cobbinah is a co-director of the Informal Urbanism Hub (InfUr) at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on urban planning and climate change in Africa and the outcomes of inappropriate planning practices and theories on African cities. He is the Africa editor of Journal of Urban Affairs, a member of the Planning Institute of Australia and the advisory board member of the Ghana Institute of Planning.
Featured image: Copper and cobalt mine near Kolwezi, DRC (Copyright Brandon Marc Finn).
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