Comparative Criteria for a Dynamic Approach to Environmental Impact Assessment and Its Influence in Mine Planning

摘要

The main principles of mine planning are based on the idea that mineral deposit to be mined has to maintain basics of safety, efficiency and profitability. Also, those principles have to be developed according the environmental protection framework. Sometimes it is thought that all these ideas are contradictory, but, actually, the project will be successful just if all of them are accomplished. Technical and environmental considerations have to be merged to cover global demand of minerals, ensuring that environmental values should not be lost or permanently degraded. The need to maintain a high degree of environmental protection with the need to maintain a high rate of exploitation of mineral resources makes this a key issue in mine planning. Also, environmental effects, permanent or temporary ones, could make mine planning is suitable or not for projet success.One of the widespread technic used to establish basics for environment protection is Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), but it has some disadvantages that are discussed in this paper. There are subjectivist points of view and a plenty of interests involved in just EIA-based techniques, which are also considered and explained.EIA techniques have to be considered as a dynamic technique to be used both in planning and operation stages to establish a comparative level of environmental risk. Also, interactions between mining projects are considered to discuss about how mine planning affect at a regional scale. This paper develops EIA technique as a comparative tool, using comparative criteria to be used in mining method selection.