![]() The repercussions of mining can touch almost every aspect of life." People are literally digging holes in their living room floors. "But they are not digging on vacant land. "You might think of mining as just digging something up," Young said. Without farmland, Congolese people were sometimes forced to cross international borders into Zambia just to purchase food. Community members reported losing communal land, farmland and homes, which miners literally dug up in order to extract cobalt. They found cobalt mining was associated with increases in violence, substance abuse, food and water insecurity, and physical and mental health challenges. What Dunn and Young discovered was deeply troubling. Unintended consequences of decarbonization By working together, we can form a whole picture of the consequences of resource extraction." "It might be difficult for engineers who are developing the technologies to understand the social effects. "For this type of work, it's important to work across fields in order to be informed," said Sera Young, study co-author and associate professor of anthropology at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. ![]() Paper co-author Gabriel Bamana, an anthropologist on faculty at Normandale Community College in Minnesota, is native Congolese and therefore could provide significant cultural and historical context for the study. The team collected qualitative data through in-depth interviews and focus-group discussions with miners and other community members. ![]() To identify barriers to and opportunities for collecting better data for S-LCA, the researchers conducted exploratory field work in cobalt mining communities in the Lualaba Province, DRC. More recently, researchers have attempted to develop similar frameworks to evaluate social life cycle assessments (S-LCA), which can be used to understand how emerging technologies affect human health and well-being. To conduct the case study, Dunn led an interdisciplinary team of engineers, anthropologists and public health experts.įor years, researchers have been conducting environmental life cycle assessments (E-LCA), in which they comprehensively and systematically calculate the environmental impacts of a product all the way from the extraction of raw materials required to make it to its use and ultimate disposal. For many engineers, it's easier to measure or calculate environmental effects than to understand the social conditions in a faraway country that they have never set foot in."ĭunn is an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and associate director of the Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience. But when it comes to the social effects, we don't have the same capability for direct comparison. "I can tell you the greenhouse gas emissions per mile for either one. "We have the framework and tools available to compare the environmental costs of automobiles that run on fossil fuels to battery-powered vehicles," said Northwestern's Jennifer Dunn, who led the study. The case study and perspective paper will be published on Dec. Such data can inform policymakers, industry leaders and consumers to make more socially and ethically responsible decisions when developing, funding and using green technologies. After studying the impacts of mining cobalt - a common ingredient in lithium-ion batteries - on communities in Africa's Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), an interdisciplinary team of researchers led by Northwestern University is calling for more data into how emerging technologies affect human health and livelihoods. ![]()
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