Modern Mining October 2025

COLUMN

GDP obsession eating us alive By Dr Ross Harvey, director of research and programmes at Good Governance Africa (GGA)

In my last column, I closed off by indicating that “until we start accounting differently for our exploitation of nature, we’re going to continue valuing the wrong things and literally cut out the branches of the tree of life from underneath ourselves. It’s a long way to fall.” This was the conclusion after having dealt with the first two prescriptions that Herman Daly left us with in his farewell speech to the World Bank. As promised, I am going to deal with the next two here and show their implications for mining. Of course, for full context, you need to read last month’s column too!

Dr Ross Harvey, director of research and programmes at Good Governance Africa (GGA)

Mining, of course, extracts materials used to build technologies that can change our carbon trajectories.

F or context, the point is that we all share one planet. We are not going to live on Mars, sorry Elon. We are not only being afflicted by climate change, but by rapid biodiversity loss too (which in turn is exacerbating the climate crisis). Six of our nine planetary boundaries have been crossed. Mining, of course, extracts materials used to build technologies that can change our carbon trajectories. Some of these new technologies can also help to reduce the ecological footprint of mining itself. So, provided we put an end to fossil fuel extraction and burning today, we might still see a favourable outcome. But hope is not a strategy. A real strategy requires a radical rethinking of how we account for negative externalities – the divergence between private returns and social costs (typically reflected in environmental damage to rivers, floodplains, etc.) So, Herman Daly’s third recommendation (back in 1994 already) was to “maximise the productivity of natural capital in the short run and invest in increasing its supply in the long run.” Put aside for a second the problems of treating our natural world merely as ‘natural capital’ and give heed to what Daly argued – the natural world and man-made capital are hardly substitutes!

Essentially, our destruction of nature has become a ‘limiting factor’ of production and we cannot replace it with anything man-made. By way of example: “The natural capital of the atmosphere’s capacity to serve as a sink for CO₂ is likely to be even more limiting to the rate at which petroleum can be burned than is the source limit of remaining oil in the ground.” Taxing production on the limiting factor is, therefore, very important, to incentivise investment in preservation of what remains of earth. We simply cannot think that planting trees or building fish farms comes anywhere close to replacing value already extracted from the system. “Cultivated natural capital usually requires a reduction in biodiversity relative to natural capital proper” – an understatement if ever there was one, but it was stated thirty years ago. Natural capital scarcity is now clearly the limiting factor to any attempts at economic growth (the chasing of which is the very thing destroying nature). Practically, when one considers a new project – let’s say it’s a hydropower dam – the implication of Daly’s point is that the ecological footprint has to be properly accounted for – and the associated activity properly taxed to incentivise natural capital

36  MODERN MINING  www.modernminingmagazine.co.za | OCTOBER 2025