van Tonder, DM, Coetzee, H, Esterhuyse, S, Strachan, L, Wade, P & Mudau, S 2009, 'South Africa’s challenges pertaining to mine closure — development and implementation of regional mining and closure strategies', in AB Fourie & M Tibbett (eds), Mine Closure 2009: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Mine Closure, Australian Centre for Geomechanics, Perth, pp. 79-91, https://doi.org/10.36487/ACG_repo/908_3
(https://papers.acg.uwa.edu.au/p/908_3_vanTonder/)
Abstract: Following the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, the South African Department of 
Minerals and Energy (DME) initiated the “Sustainable Development through Mining” (SDM) programme to 
assist in the development of a strategic framework for sustainable development in the minerals and mining 
sector. This initiative supported a variety of projects including a project specifically orientated towards 
integrated regional mine closure and its implications. This paper focuses on the increasingly challenging 
environment of changing community expectations, stricter regulatory controls and greater public scrutiny in 
areas of cumulative, interconnected, or multi-mine, and/or an integrated environmental and socio-economic 
impact at a regional level. The paper discusses the challenges in the development and implementation of the 
concept of regional mine closure strategies, as support to further policy and legislative interventions in 
South Africa, and outlines proposed strategies to address these challenges. Regional closure strategies aim 
to provide a framework within which mines can develop closure plans that address broader development 
priorities as well as possible cumulative impacts of a number of mines, taking into consideration socio-
economic and environmental issues on a regional basis. A strategic framework was developed for the 
Witwatersrand gold mining region within which individual mines will be able to plan for mine closure. In 
order for the strategy to be implemented there are a number of key success factors. These include issues 
around closure planning, buy-in from stakeholders, trade-offs, stakeholder engagement, setting-up of 
completion criteria (balanced scorecard for regional mine closure), targeted research and data 
management. This paper is a follow-up on work reported.