De Beers Group is joining billions round the world in celebrating Earth Day today and has underlined its commitment to the theme of the day – protect our species.
Sunrise over Orapa Game Park in Botswana.
Patti Wickens, Senior Environmental Manager, said: “We at De Beers Group are big supporters of Earth Day. We recognise that you can’t recover nature’s treasures without treasuring nature. So for us every day is Earth Day. Protecting our species is central to what we do.”
Estimates suggest that about one billion people in 192 countries take part in Earth Day. The aim is to provoke policy and behavioural change. The first Earth Day was in 1970, when 20 million Americans took to the streets to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment.
De Beers Group has established a key position in protecting fauna and flora through its Diamond Route properties, a collection of biodiversity conservation sites that span 200,000 hectares across southern Africa.
A team of in-house ecologists oversees the work done on protecting species, many on the endangered list, and supports a range of studies and research projects that seek to understand and preserve the huge variety of animals and plants on the properties.
The Group has been awarded a series of awards over the years for biodiversity conservation. The most recent is an award of excellence in environmental sustainability from Mining Review Africa, a publication distributed throughout Africa and internationally to decision-makers in the mining industry.
The central feature of the Group’s submission was its work to translocate around 200 elephants across 1,700km from the company’s Venetia Limpopo Nature Reserve (VLNR) in South Africa to Mozambique. For the first phase of the project, 48 elephants were moved to Zinave National Park in July and August 2018, and the rest will be moved over the next two years.
This flagship operation, run jointly with the not-for-profit Peace Parks Foundation, is one of the largest elephant translocations ever recorded in South Africa. It is part of a major conservation initiative to protect the welfare of wildlife in the country as well as helping to restore Mozambique’s elephant population.
One judge said De Beers Group’s submission was impressive, noting that for every hectare the company uses for mining, six are dedicated to the conservation of nature.
Another translocation project involved moving four lions, two male and two female, from the VLNR to Liwonde National Park in southern Malawi. It was carried out by African Parks as part of its attempt to restore the predator populations in both Liwonde National Park and Majete Wildlife Reserve.
De Beers Group has also facilitated a ground-breaking research project based at its Rooiport Nature Reserve in South Africa that is helping scientists understand more about the behaviour of giraffes in their natural environment.
Scientists fitted special GPS ‘collars’ on the heads of 18 giraffes (11 females and seven males). The collars store information on, for example, giraffe movements and migration routes. Results of the study will emerge during 2019.
De Beers Group starts planning for the closure of a mine before it even opens, with the objective of returning the mine site to its original state when mining ceases. Its latest mine to close is Victor in Canada, where a pioneering reclamation programme has been undertaken, involving the planting of hundreds of thousands of trees and seedlings. The plan is that, by the end of 2022, all 853 hectares will be reclaimed and re-vegetated.
On the agenda next is a programme to encourage young people to become junior rangers to introduce the idea of protecting species to a new young audience. The programme, to be launched later in the year, will enable small groups of schoolchildren to explore the VLNR, identifying bird species and getting involved in such activities as rock painting and bird nest weaving. At the end, they will make a ‘conservation pledge’ and receive a Junior Ranger badge.