Surface-strip coal mine land rehabilitation planning in South Africa and Australia: Maturity and opportunities for improvement

At the mine approval phase, there is logically a focus on mine start-up and operational requirements, however, insufficient attention is given to rehabilitation planning aspects. To evaluate how rehabilitation planning is addressed upfront, we proposed a maturity model, which consists of three maturity performance indicators measured for seven environmental domain evaluative criteria. The maturity model, was applied to mine rehabilitation guidelines and mine approval consultant rehabilitation reports in South Africa and Australia, Queensland and New South Wales. We found that these documents were vulnerable to adequate, but not yet resilient, i.e. rehabilitation information was gathered, but seldom analysed, with limited integration and rehabilitation risk determination. Legislation, as well as the temporary and dynamic nature of mining, may inadvertently be contributing to immaturity. We conclude by discussing ways forward and the need to determine upfront, a site's total rehabilitation failure risk, as an aid to improving rehabilitation planning.