(In) sustainability of mining in Latin America? A systematic review of trends and gaps

Abstract

Mining is the extraction of minerals at various scales and in various modalities. Like any other economic sector of production, it generates positive and negative impacts. However, they also generate negative impacts such as the contamination if there is no good environmental management or social responsibility. For this reason, many mining countries, have social conflicts due to these impacts, before exists the Observatory of Mining Conflicts which maps the origin and cause of mining conflicts. The question that guides this article is: What aspects relate mining to sustainability? Thus, the objective of this article is to present a multilevel systematic review of scientific and political documents to identify the perspectives and gaps of sustainability in the mining sector from a perspective of environmental epistemology in four categories: (i) the presence of the environment in mining, (ii) environmental management, (iii) conflicts and (iv) solutions. A total of 87,197 scientific documents and 14,303 legislative documents were found at a global and transnational level, which were categorized and filtered according to the PRISMA methodology to review the four categories. There is no doubt that the mining sector must apply terms such as effective environmental management and sustainable development, being able to do so through various tools; such as compliance with mandatory national and international norms and standards and even voluntary environmental certifications through the inclusion of clean technologies or management terms such as the circular economy and industrial ecology.