A coalition of community, environmental and human rights organisations say the new draft environmental impact report for Tendele Coal Mine to expand its operations on the KwaZulu-Natal North Coast, is a sweetheart report. One of their attorneys, Janice Tooley says this refers to a practice where negative impacts are underplayed while overstating the benefits. It has taken Tendele 27 months to redo the environmental impact assessment since the Pretoria High Court in 2022 set aside the mining license that was issued in 2016. Tooley says they have submitted their comments to the consultants doing the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) in the past week. We invited Tendele mine to respond and in their response, they note among other things… “The first point to note is that All Rise have launched, and lost, six court applications against Tendele since 2017 in their efforts to achieve the closure of the mine. In one of the more recent court cases, Judge Bam did, in a 2022 finding, note certain inadequacies in the public participation process (PPP) carried out by the mine in its efforts to achieve the right to extend its mining to additional areas (which will enable the mine’s life to be extended by another ten years) under a mining right and EMPr awarded in 2016. The Judge required us to repeat the PPP, which is what we have been pursuing conscientiously since then.” See Tendele Coal Mine’s full response herein.