'New draft impact report for Tendele Coal Mine is misleading’ 21 July 2024

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.

“In the environmental management industry, a sweetheart report is a report that only reports on the findings that are favourable to the applicant and then downplay all the negative impacts. So, (it) distorts, really, the truth about what the impacts are. And the problem with that is that it misleads the decisionmaker and ultimately, you know, ends up with inequitable distribution of adverse impacts on vulnerable people in society,” says Tooley. The consultants now need to take the public comments into account while drawing up a final EIA report that will be submitted to the Minister of Mineral and Energy Resources as part of the application for mining rights.

Tooley says there are several discrepancies between how impacts are described in the draft report and the specialists’ findings. She says, according to the report, blasting may cause unpleasant vibrations at homes 800 metres from the mine. However, Tooley says specialists found that there would be unacceptable high impacts from blasting, noise and dust beyond the 500 metre safety zone and up to 4 kilometres away. “So, in terms of the mine health and safety regulations, if a mine is going to do blasting, it needs a special permit if it’s going to blast and there are structures, roads, schools or houses within a 500 metre radius from the pits where they’re going to blast. In Ophondweni, there’s a primary school there, less than 500 metres of the pit. Tendele has said it doesn’t intend moving that school,” Tooley explains.