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Surface coal mines, when abandoned or closed, pose significant environmental and socioeconomic challenges. Repurposing these sites is crucial for sustainable land use and responsible resource management. This study presents a comprehensive decision framework tailored to the Indian mining context, utilizing a hybrid approach combining the analytic h...
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... Prioritizing environmental rehabilitation and repurposing and redeveloping land, power plants, and other coal mining assets can facilitate the restoration of natural habitats, and the enhancement of ecosystem services that local communities rely on, while also ensuring the long-term safety and stability of sites, attracting new opportunities, and bringing broader social benefits to the local community (Singh, Agarwal, and Prabhat 2024;World Bank 2024a). Land and other mining assets can be repurposed as wildlife habitats, forests, ecoresorts, recreational parks, museums and cultural sites, skills training centers, solid waste management centers, solar parks, youth centers, and research and innovation hubs (Ballesteros and Ramírez 2007;Deng et al. 2020;Gandah and Atiyat 2016;Lituma et al. 2021). ...
With climate change causing loss and damage, disrupting nature, and affecting the lives of billions of people, the world has accepted that it cannot achieve carbon dioxide reduction goals without phasing out coal. This paper argues that addressing the broader social dimensions of coal transitions is crucial for success and offers benefits and opportunities for the millions of people affected. It outlines existing literature about anticipated impacts of the transition not just on workers but on people and communities more broadly, such as loss of employment, increased household costs, reduced public investment, mobility and outmigration, mental health, social and cultural identity, and conflict. It also considers the social co-benefits of coal transitions, such as reduced risks to livelihoods, new job opportunities, improvements in health and wellbeing, and social empowerment. Finally, it cautions that the uneven distribution of transition benefits and burdens can exacerbate pre-existing inequalities and systemic marginalization, reproducing the energy sector’s legacy of social exclusion and injustice (Johnson et al. 2020), underlining that social sustainability, alongside economic and environmental sustainability, is vital for advancing a just transition away from coal. The paper offers a framework of upstream interventions to help governments and other actors facilitate inclusive planning, decision-making, and transition management.
... Choosing an appropriate evaluation method can enhance the objectivity and reliability of the evaluation results. The combination of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the analytic hierarchy process (FCE) can evaluate problems via qualitative and quantitative methods according to the relationship among the indexes [29,30]. An evaluation model, by using the AHP-FCE method, has been applied in assessing ecosystems. ...
... The carbon sequestration capacity of restoration mines should be evaluated by scientific, systematic, hierarchical, independent indexes. The AHP model decomposes the targeted goal into the goal layer, criterion layer, and scheme layer and clusters the indexes according to the interrelationships, while the FCE method provides a quantitative and qualitative approach for evaluation based on the fuzzy transformation and maximum membership principle, solving the ambiguity and uncertainty in the judgment process [29][30][31]. ...
Open-pit mining seriously damages the original vegetation community and soil layer and disturbs the carbon cycle of vegetation and soil, causing instability in the mining ecosystem and decrease in the carbon sequestration capacity of the mining area. With the deepening of environmental awareness and the influence of related policies, the ecological restoration of open-pit mines has been promoted. The mining ecosystem is distinct owing to the disperse distribution of mines and small scale of single mines. However, the carbon sequestration capability of mines after ecological restoration has not been clearly evaluated. Therefore, this study evaluated the carbon sequestration capacity of restoration mines, taking the mines of the Yangtze River Basin in Jurong City, Jiangsu Province as the research objects. Firstly, the visual effects of the vegetation and soil in their current status were determined through field investigation, the methods for sampling and data collection for the vegetation and soil were selected, and the specific laboratory tests such as the vegetation carbon content and soil organic carbon were clarified. Meanwhile, the evaluation system consisting of three aspects and nine evaluation indexes was established by using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE). The process of evaluation included the following: the establishment of the judgment matrix, calculation of the index weight, determination of the membership function, and establishment of the fuzzy membership matrix. Finally, the evaluation results of the restoration mines were determined with the ‘excellent, good, normal and poor’ grade classification according to the evaluation standards for each index proposed considering the data of the field investigation and laboratory tests. The results indicated that (1) the evaluation results of the mines’ carbon sequestration capacity were of excellent and good grade at a proportion of 62.5% and 37.5%, which was in line with the field investigation results and demonstrated the carbon sequestration capacity of all the restored mines was effectively improved; and (2) the weights of the criterion layer were ranked as system stability > vegetation > soil with the largest value of 0.547, indicating the stability of the system is the main factor in the carbon sequestration capacity of the mines and the sustainability of the vegetation community and the stability of soil fixation on the slope. The proposed evaluation system effectively evaluates the short-term carbon sequestration capability of the restoration mining system according to the visual effects and the laboratory testing results, objectively reflecting the carbon sequestration capacity via qualitative assessment and quantitative analysis. The evaluation method is relatively applicable and reliable for restoration mines and can provide a reference for similar ecological restoration engineering.
