- After the Cobre Panamá copper mine shut down in 2023, the mine’s infrastructure was left to waste away by the company in a biodiverse jungle area on Panama’s Atlantic coast.
- A new report by Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW) has found that the mine’s tailings dam is at a very serious and imminent risk of failure due to poor monitoring and internal erosion.
- Indigenous communities nearby have reported even more contamination in the water sources that run through their communities, leading to the disappearance of key species, the destruction of wetlands and health issues among residents.
- Experts said current mine closure regulations in Latin America are insufficient and the planning and development of responsible closure plans should focus on managing both social and environmental impacts.
Ever since the Cobre Panamá mine was forced to shut down in 2023, the copper mine’s infrastructure has been eroding away in a biodiverse jungle on Panama’s Atlantic coast — a situation researchers say is all too common.
Without proper maintenance, monitoring and rehabilitation, inactive mines can pose serious threats to environmental and human health. In 2019, the collapse of an iron ore tailings dam in southeastern Brazil led to the deaths of 272 people. Around 10 million cubic meters (353 cubic feet or 2.6 billion gallons) of toxic waste burst from the dam at the time, causing widespread environmental damage in the Brumadinho Valley, Minas Gerais.
Between 1915 and 2021, 342 tailings dams failed around the world, 57% of which occurred in the Americas. It was found that these failures happen almost every year, mostly due to heavy rainfall or earthquakes.
In the case of the Brumadinho dam, the mine had been shut for three years when it failed without warning. It was later discovered that the accident was caused by a phenomenon known as “creep,” which is a result of slowly accumulating imperceptible deformations in the sediment that make up the dam.
Researchers from the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW) analyzed the monitoring reports and audit documents of Minera Panamá, the owner of the Cobre Panamá mine and a subsidiary of the Canadian company First Quantum Minerals. In their report, the researchers revealed that the Panama mine’s tailings dam was at serious risk of failure due to internal erosion.
Isaías Ramos, a technical specialist at the Environmental Advocacy Center (CIAM), told Mongabay “the filtration of heavy metals and toxic chemicals can damage the surrounding ecosystems, affecting flora, fauna and water resources.”
Cobre Panamá is located inside Donoso, a multiple-use protected area in the heart of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, a piece of land that connects natural areas in seven countries of Central America to southern Mexico. It is home to many threatened species, such as the jaguar (Panthera onca), harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja) and great green macaw (Ara ambiguus). It is also the only known habitat of the recently described and critically endangered Geminis’ dart frog (Andinobates geminisae).
Minera Panamá and Panama’s Ministry of Environment did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment by the time of publication.
Some Indigenous leaders from communities near the Cobre Panamá mine told Mongabay their water sources are contaminated, leading to the disappearance of important species, the destruction of wetlands and health issues among residents. Residents said the situation has worsened since the mine closed.
“Our community is located at the mouth of the waters that flow directly from the construction of the tailings dam and the mining extraction pits,” Abelizario Rodriguez, a resident of the Caimito Indigenous community, told Mongabay. “Nature’s alarm is ringing; our species are dying. We human beings are receiving that contamination and we will go next.”
‘Immediate concern’
Cobre Panamá was the country’s largest copper mine. Spanning 13,000 hectares (32,100 acres), an area larger than San Francisco, it was capable of producing more than 350,000 tons of copper a year, which is enough to build about 5 million electric vehicles. The mine accounted for roughly 1.5% of the world’s copper supply in 2023, and its closure was one of the key catalysts behind the industry’s global copper shortages, investors say.
The mine’s last ton of copper was produced in November 2023. After this, the company said the mine entered a phase of preservation and safe management (P&SM), which involves regular maintenance and monitoring. Approximately 1,400 workers remain on-site to run the P&SM program, which costs between $15 million and $20 million a month.
Companies are required to use inclinometers to monitor the stability of a tailings dam. An inclinometer is an instrument used to measure angles of slope, elevation or depression of an object. However, the ELAW report found none of the inclinometers in Cobre Panamá are functioning.
It also found that the company had not monitored the pore waters of its waste rock piles or tailings dam for the early detection of acid mine drainage, violating national laws, the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management and the requirements listed in the acid rock drainage guide, or GARD Guide, an important standard developed by the International Network for Acid Prevention.
Copper ore contains about 35% sulfur, which can acidify when exposed to air and rain. According to ELAW, acid mine drainage has been triggered at the Cobre Panamá mine, raising concerns among researchers and local communities about the impact on the environment. Its highly acidic water is laden with heavy metals that can contaminate water resources and cause harm to humans, animals and plants.
Milciades Abrego from the Nueva Lucha Indigenous community told Mongabay the contamination has impacted the land where his community grows food. “Before the company arrived, we lived peacefully, we lived well and we had food,” he said. “Now, production has fallen. Corn, yucca, yam, everything does not produce well. When they are planted, they all die.”
ELAW are not the first to raise the alarm. In May last year, NewFields Mining Design & Technical Services, an environmental, engineering and construction management consulting firm, published a report that found the north wall of the tailings dam at risk of failure. According to its independent experts, this was because liquids in the dam had come too close to the north wall, creating the risk of erosion by seepage, a phenomenon known as piping. To avoid damage to the dam or failure, liquids in the tailings dam should not be closer than 400 meters (1,312 feet) to the wall.
But there are liquids 195 m (640 ft) from the north wall.
Improvements needed
In recent years, the challenges posed by mine closures have drawn the attention of leaders across South America. Governments in the region, most of which previously relied on mining companies to follow international standards on mine closure, have taken steps to ensure these operations are properly planned and initiated.
According to Joana Abrego, CIAM legal manager, Panama has few regulations on the proper monitoring and maintenance of inactive mining infrastructure. Like many other Latin American countries, the country’s legislative expectations are established through environmental and social impact assessments (EIAs). Abrego told Mongabay that mining companies have a general duty to prepare specific closure plans in coordination with the Ministry of Environment, “but this mechanism has not been regulated.”
An EIA for Cobre Panamá was approved in 2011 and included a closure plan that needed to be updated every five years. However, Abrego said this plan never included information on how to respond in cases of immediate or unexpected closure.
She added that in December 2023, the Ministry of Commerce ordered the company to prepare an environmental preservation and safe management plan, which was submitted in January 2024 but has not yet been approved. The government also said in a public statement that it would begin the process of creating a new closure plan design, but there has been no update since.
Poor planning in cases of immediate closure can also have a large impact on local communities that work for the mines and become dependent on them. Elisa Arond, a research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told Mongabay over email that legislation on mine closures often focuses on safety, minimizing risks and containing or reducing environmental impacts. “However, another key aspect of mine closure at a local and regional level, especially, is considering the broader social and economic impacts,” she said, such as how workers will be compensated or supported once their jobs are eliminated.
“We must understand that these types of projects have a positive and negative impact on the communities where they are developed,” Rodriguez said. “This [work] can cause greater poverty in the communities because the [cultivation] work that was being done, which in some way was sustainable, stopped,” he explained. “The expectation was to improve the quality of life through employment and money, but after you lose your job, you no longer have money in your hands, and you no longer have the ability of making the land produce.”
Governments often face the issue that legal commitments adopted through an EIA process do not guarantee them protection against financial liabilities that may come with the closure of a mining site. If a government has no measure to force payment of closure costs, in scenarios like company bankruptcy, it may find it has to pay for the operation itself.
“When a permit is issued, there is always a question of risks that have to be taken, and who or what takes the risk and who or what benefits from the risks,” a spokesperson for ELAW told Mongabay. “Unfortunately, the parties that will pay the consequences of a project if it doesn’t go as expected or originally planned are the local communities, taxpayers and the environment. It’s a very biased and unjust process.”
Closing mines in other countries
In Latin America, only Peru and Chile have established comprehensive, national mine closure legislation that requires mining operations to provide financial assurance for closure liabilities. In both countries, the oversight of mine closure occurs largely at the national level. However, a report by the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development (IGF) found both countries do not place much emphasis on the social aspects of mine closure, nor land use post-closure.
In Colombia, companies are only responsible for environmental impacts up to three years after closure, which Arond said is inadequate given that mine closures can have long-term consequences that persist for hundreds of years. There have been policy discussions to replace this law, but the difficulty is in how to make it retroactive to ensure that mines that already exist are covered.
The Prodeco mines in the Cesar and Magdalena departments of Colombia began the formal process of relinquishing their contracts in 2020, a process that was initially rejected by the government because of outstanding environmental and social obligations. Now, the company faces legal challenges from affected rural communities due to the damage caused by its unexpected and irregular closure process.
“The planning and development of a responsible closure plan should focus on managing risks, including preventing and mitigating negative impacts — both social and environmental,” Arond said. “Landscapes and regions that have been affected should be rehabilitated to the best practice and safest conditions.”
Banner image: According to a new report by Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW), Cobra Panamá’s tailings dam is at a very serious and imminent risk of failure due to poor monitoring and internal erosion. Image courtesy of the Environmental Advocacy Center (CIAM).
Citations:
Konanç, M. U., Değermenci, G. D., Kariper, İ. A., & Yavuz, E. (2024). After-effects of a closed copper mine: Detailed analysis of environmental impacts in soil and plant samples. Environmental Earth Sciences, 83(13). doi:10.1007/s12665-024-11725-9
Lin, S., Wang, G., Liu, W., Zhao, B., Shen, Y., Wang, M., & Li, X. (2022). Regional distribution and causes of global mine tailings dam failures. Metals, 12(6), 905. doi:10.3390/met12060905
Zhu, F., Zhang, W., & Puzrin, A. M. (2024). The slip surface mechanism of delayed failure of the Brumadinho tailings dam in 2019. Communications Earth & Environment, 5(1). doi:10.1038/s43247-023-01086-9
Wang, G., Zhao, B., Zhao, K., Wu, B., Zhong, W., & Liu, W. (2023). Piping-seepage mechanism of tailings with different fine particle contents. International Journal of Geomechanics, 23(11). doi:10.1061/ijgnai.gmeng-8657
Gregory, G. H. (2021). Rendering mine closure governable and constraints to inclusive development in the andean region. Resources Policy, 72, 102053. doi:10.1016/j.resourpol.2021.102053
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