BY JOHN HOUANIHAU
As mining companies move in to replace logging, the risks to land, culture, and future generations continue and the people most affected should be the ones leading the response.
The ICAAD (International Centre for Advocates Against Discrimination), the Development Services Exchange (DSE), Apunepara Ha’amwa’ora Natural Resources Association (AHRNA), and a CBO from Lauru/Choiseul Province have partnered to develop a mining toolkit.
The Mining Toolkit is supported and funded by the Earth Rising Foundation.
This toolkit empowers communities across the Solomon Islands to influence decision makers about mining and to protect what matters most to them.
The toolkit helps communities to ask the right questions, understand the laws, and organise effectively so that their voice matters in decisions about their future and the power to shape what happens in their community.
This toolkit was designed to support landowners, community leaders, conservation groups, and individuals who care about their communities and the environment to rebuild their power to make decisions in the best interests of present and future generations.
The toolkit resource brings together strategies, legal knowledge, and community organising tools shaped by shared experience and commitment to indigenous self-determination, environmental justice, and climate action from collaborative parties.
It has been stipulated in the toolkit that communities have real power when they understand how decisions are made, know their rights and work together, and provide a brief explanation of how the extractive industries are connected to larger systems shaped by long histories of who holds power and who doesn’t.
The mining toolkit also looks at what the laws are, helping communities and individuals to decide whether there is a need to change the rules and or advocate to enforce existing law.
The Development Services Exchange (DSE), through the ICAAD (International Centre for Advocates Against Discrimination), Apunepara Ha’amwa’ora Natural Resources Association (AHRNA), and a CBO from Lauru/Choiseul Province have urged landowners, communities and individuals to utilise the mining toolkit for advocacy when it comes to extractive industries.
The Mining toolkit online version can be accessed through htts://icaad.ngo/toolkit-solomon-islands/
For feedback, contact: [email protected]
