Water defenders just won an important battle in Cuenca, Southern Ecuador, against metal mining in the Kimsakocha páramos, where Canadian company Dundee Precious Metals is attempting to develop its Loma Larga gold-arsenic mine. On Tuesday, a local judge granted Protective Measures to the Kimsakocha páramos and suspended all mining activities on the grounds that the Ecuadorian State and company failed to consult with affected communities.

Risks escalating due to more frequent catastrophic climate change-related weather events

A B.C.-based company is looking to unleash a new era of resource extraction, raising questions over how to protect the planet's deep-sea ecosystems we know the least about. Stefan Labbé reports for North Shore News.

A House of Commons committee is studying links between resource extraction and violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada. 

The Standing Committee on the Status of Women, made up of Liberal, Conservative and New Democratic MPs, announced the study in April in response to calls to justice from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. 

The case study with footnotes is available here.

Ownership history

Community members maintain they were not properly consulted by Solaris, and that the company’s model of dialogue has in fact displaced their ancestral governance systems. Meanwhile Canada’s government is chipping in by helping develop a licensing system in the country that could expand mining even more. Solaris appears to have fully exported the Canadian reconciliation model: a new rhetorical and tactical embrace of Indigenous peoples, covering for the same old resource pillage. Ana Cristina Alvarado reports for The Breach.

"By participating in the national strike, the communities who are resisting mining are expressing their rejection and indignation against all attempts to silence their reality. They denounce that around 15% of national lands are subject to mining concessions, and that more than 3 million hectares will be explored for metal mining – of which approximately 400,000 hectares are in Indigenous territories." -- A translated statement by Acción Ecológica in Ecuador, in light of the national strikes. See the original statement in Spanish.

(Ottawa/Montreal/Manila/Boac) Legal proceedings initiated in the Philippines in 2001 finally brought a measure of justice to thirty plaintiffs from two villages on the Island of Marinduque on May 16, 2022.  

Trevali Mining Corp. says it has recovered the bodies of the final two of eight workers killed after its Perkoa Mine in Burkina Faso flooded following heavy rainfall on Apr. 16. MiningWatch Canada, an Ottawa-based industry watchdog, has questioned how well the company was prepared for disaster and criticized the federal government's lack of regulations on how Canadian mining companies operate internationally.

(Montreal/Saint-Michel-des-Saints) With the support of environmental organizations, citizens announced the beginning of an independent environmental monitoring of Nouveau Monde Graphite’s (NMG-Pallinghurst) Matawinie project, which targets the battery market. They are making the announcement today as they attend the company’s annual shareholder meeting.