Zik Igbadi Boniwe

Sustainable Extractive Sector Management Zik Igbadi Boniwe

The planet earth is fortified with abundant natural resources such as land and its contents, air with its constituent elements, and water with both living and nonliving things. These natural resources create a system of ecosystem regeneration for sustainability. Through history, humanity has depended on these natural resources for sustenance. Extractive companies involved in harnessing these natural resources for the benefit of humanity have advanced technological adeptness that has steered toward massive exploration, exploitation, processing, usage, and disposal of these resources. The associated activities of natural resources development have improved and also negatively impacted quality of life from the prehistoric age to modern industrial society. No doubt, the extractive sector has positively contributed to technological advancement and improved education, incomes, and access to health care, which hold ever-greater promise for longer, healthier, more secure lives both in developed and some developing countries. However, there is also a widespread sense of instability in the world today from the activities of the extractive companies in livelihoods, in personal security, in the environment, and in global politics in almost all the developing countries where the extractive industries operate. Sustainable Extractive Sector Management: Issues and Prospects delves into both the positive and negative impacts of the extractive sector on the governments, the extractive companies and the hosts, and impacted communities by taking a comprehensive look at the conflicts that encumber sustainable extractive sector management. It enunciates the critical issues that need to be addressed or reversed with implementation strategies. This will avert continuous disruptions of extractive industries operations and improve quality of lives of all stakeholders to ensure sustainable socioeconomic development through mutual collaboration of key stakeholder groups.