Patterns of infringement, risk, and impact driven by coal mining permits in Indonesia.

Coal mining is known for its contributions to climate change, but its impacts on the environment and human lives near mine sites are less widely recognised. This study integrates remote sensing, GIS, stakeholder interviews and extensive review of provincial data and documents to identify patterns of infringement, risk and impact driven by coal mining expansion across East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Specifically, we map and analyse patterns of mining concessions, land clearing, water cover, human settlement, and safety risks, and link them with mining governance and regulatory infractions related to coal mining permits. We show that excessive, improper permit granting and insufficient monitoring and oversight have led to deforestation, widespread overlaps of concessions with settlements, extensive boundary and regulatory violations, lacking reclamation, and numerous deaths. As the world's largest thermal coal exporter, Indonesia's elevated coal infringements, risks, and impacts translate to supply chain, sustainability, and human rights concerns for global coal markets.

An open database on global coal and metal mine production.

While the extraction of natural resources has been well documented and analysed at the national level, production trends at the level of individual mines are more difficult to uncover, mainly due to poor availability of mining data with sub-national detail. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by presenting an open database on global coal and metal mine production on the level of individual mines. It is based on manually gathered information from more than 1900 freely available reports of mining companies, where every data point is linked to its source document, ensuring full transparency. The database covers 1171 individual mines and reports mine-level production for 80 different materials in the period 2000-2021. Furthermore, also data on mining coordinates, ownership, mineral reserves, mining waste, transportation of mining products, as well as mineral processing capacities (smelters and mineral refineries) and production is included.

A pantropical assessment of deforestation caused by industrial mining.

Growing demand for minerals continues to drive deforestation worldwide. Tropical forests are particularly vulnerable to the environmental impacts of mining and mineral processing. Many local- to regional-scale studies document extensive, long-lasting impacts of mining on biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, the full scope of deforestation induced by industrial mining across the tropics is yet unknown. Here, we present a biome-wide assessment to show where industrial mine expansion has caused the most deforestation from 2000 to 2019. We find that 3,264 km2 of forest was directly lost due to industrial mining, with 80% occurring in only four countries: Indonesia, Brazil, Ghana, and Suriname. Additionally, controlling for other nonmining determinants of deforestation, we find that mining caused indirect forest loss in two-thirds of the investigated countries. Our results illustrate significant yet unevenly distributed and often unmanaged impacts on these biodiverse ecosystems. Impact assessments and mitigation plans of industrial mining activities must address direct and indirect impacts to support conservation of the world's tropical forests.

An update on global mining land use.

The growing demand for minerals has pushed mining activities into new areas increasingly affecting biodiversity-rich natural biomes. Mapping the land use of the global mining sector is, therefore, a prerequisite for quantifying, understanding and mitigating adverse impacts caused by mineral extraction. This paper updates our previous work mapping mining sites worldwide. Using visual interpretation of Sentinel-2 images for 2019, we inspected more than 34,000 mining locations across the globe. The result is a global-scale dataset containing 44,929 polygon features covering 101,583 km2 of large-scale as well as artisanal and small-scale mining. The increase in coverage is substantial compared to the first version of the dataset, which included 21,060 polygons extending over 57,277 km2. The polygons cover open cuts, tailings dams, waste rock dumps, water ponds, processing plants, and other ground features related to the mining activities. The dataset is available for download from https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.942325 and visualisation at www.fineprint.global/viewer .

A global-scale data set of mining areas.

The area used for mineral extraction is a key indicator for understanding and mitigating the environmental impacts caused by the extractive sector. To date, worldwide data products on mineral extraction do not report the area used by mining activities. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by presenting a new data set of mining extents derived by visual interpretation of satellite images. We delineated mining areas within a 10 km buffer from the approximate geographical coordinates of more than six thousand active mining sites across the globe. The result is a global-scale data set consisting of 21,060 polygons that add up to 57,277 km2. The polygons cover all mining above-ground features that could be identified from the satellite images, including open cuts, tailings dams, waste rock dumps, water ponds, and processing infrastructure. The data set is available for download from https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.910894 and visualization at www.fineprint.global/viewer .

FABIO-The Construction of the Food and Agriculture Biomass Input-Output Model.

Harvested biomass is linked to final consumption by networks of processes and actors that convert and distribute food and nonfood goods. Achieving a sustainable resource metabolism of the economy is an overarching challenge which manifests itself in a number of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Modeling the physical dimensions of biomass conversion and distribution networks is essential to understanding the characteristics, drivers, and dynamics of the socio-economic biomass metabolism. In this paper, we present the Food and Agriculture Biomass Input-Output model (FABIO), a set of multiregional supply, use and input-output tables in physical units, that document the complex flows of agricultural and food products in the global economy. The model assembles FAOSTAT statistics reporting crop production, trade, and utilization in physical units, supplemented by data on technical and metabolic conversion efficiencies, into a consistent, balanced, input-output framework. FABIO covers 191 countries and 130 agriculture, food and forestry products from 1986 to 2013. The physical supply use tables offered by FABIO provide a comprehensive, transparent, and flexible structure for organizing data representing flows of materials within metabolic networks. They allow tracing of biomass flows and embodied environmental pressures along global supply chains at an unprecedented level of product and country detail and can help to answer a range of questions regarding environment, agriculture, and trade. Here we apply FABIO to the case of cropland footprints and show the evolution of consumption-based cropland demand in China, the E.U., and the U.S.A. for plant-based and livestock-based food and nonfood products.

Production of docosahexaenoic acid by Aurantiochytrium sp. ATCC PRA-276

Abstract The high costs and environmental concerns associated with using marine resources as sources of oils rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids have prompted searches for alternative sources of such oils. Some microorganisms, among them members of the genus Aurantiochytrium, can synthesize large amounts of these biocompounds. However, various parameters that affect the polyunsaturated fatty acids production of these organisms, such as the carbon and nitrogen sources supplied during their cultivation, require further elucidation. The objective of this investigation was to study the effect of different concentrations of carbon and total nitrogen on the production of polyunsaturated fatty acids, particularly docosahexaenoic acid, by Aurantiochytrium sp. ATCC PRA-276. We performed batch system experiments using an initial glucose concentration of 30 g/L and three different concentrations of total nitrogen, including 3.0, 0.44, and 0.22 g/L, and fed-batch system experiments in which 0.14 g/L of glucose and 0.0014 g/L of total nitrogen were supplied hourly. To assess the effects of these different treatments, we determined the biomass, glucose, total nitrogen and polyunsaturated fatty acids concentration. The maximum cell concentration (23.9 g/L) was obtained after 96 h of cultivation in the batch system using initial concentrations of 0.22 g/L total nitrogen and 30 g/L glucose. Under these conditions, we observed the highest level of polyunsaturated fatty acids production (3.6 g/L), with docosahexaenoic acid and docosapentaenoic acid ω6 concentrations reaching 2.54 and 0.80 g/L, respectively.

Production of docosahexaenoic acid by Aurantiochytrium sp. ATCC PRA-276.

The high costs and environmental concerns associated with using marine resources as sources of oils rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids have prompted searches for alternative sources of such oils. Some microorganisms, among them members of the genus Aurantiochytrium, can synthesize large amounts of these biocompounds. However, various parameters that affect the polyunsaturated fatty acids production of these organisms, such as the carbon and nitrogen sources supplied during their cultivation, require further elucidation. The objective of this investigation was to study the effect of different concentrations of carbon and total nitrogen on the production of polyunsaturated fatty acids, particularly docosahexaenoic acid, by Aurantiochytrium sp. ATCC PRA-276. We performed batch system experiments using an initial glucose concentration of 30g/L and three different concentrations of total nitrogen, including 3.0, 0.44, and 0.22g/L, and fed-batch system experiments in which 0.14g/L of glucose and 0.0014g/L of total nitrogen were supplied hourly. To assess the effects of these different treatments, we determined the biomass, glucose, total nitrogen and polyunsaturated fatty acids concentration. The maximum cell concentration (23.9g/L) was obtained after 96h of cultivation in the batch system using initial concentrations of 0.22g/L total nitrogen and 30g/L glucose. Under these conditions, we observed the highest level of polyunsaturated fatty acids production (3.6g/L), with docosahexaenoic acid and docosapentaenoic acid ω6 concentrations reaching 2.54 and 0.80g/L, respectively.