Climate change is one of the most important issues of our time and we are now at a defining moment. Shifting weather patterns threaten areas such as food production and rising sea levels that increase the risk of catastrophic flooding, which already severely threatens lives and livelihoods across the planet. To reverse this development, the emission of greenhouse gas has to decrease. To make this happen, we must make a transition to renewable energy. A consequence of that however, is that the demand for minerals, especially critical raw minerals, has increased since they are necessary for the development of new green technology, for example, electric cars, windmills, and solar panels. Sweden has good geological potential to extract several of the critical raw minerals, and thereby Sweden has the ability to play a key role in the development of green technology. Swedish environmental policy first and foremost aims to promote sustainable development. The ambitions of protecting biodiversity and valuable ecosystems, and mining are hard to combine, but they share the goal of creating sustainable development. In Sweden's environmental code (Miljöbalken), both extraction of minerals and the protection of nature are regarded as valuable interests. However, it’s not unusual that these goals conflict which leads to complicated assessments. What goal should be prioritized when the will to preserve and protect a certain area conflict with the will to expropriate it? As a consequence of the interest of mining, the process to receive a permit for mining activities is differently regulated than permits for other environmentally hazardous activities. It's clear that reasons beyond the environmental sphere play an important role when it comes to mining. For example, the divided process, which is the preliminary assessment regarding land use and the second and total assessment in which the court is bound by the preliminary assessment of land use, can be criticized from an ecological perspective. Considering that temperature increase is held to be disastrous, and the potentially detrimental effects of mining cause complex conflicts of interest, these assessments must be dealt with through rules that are transparent regarding the environmentally positive and negative consequences of the activities that are a part of mining. In addition to transparency, the mining industry needs incentives for promoting activities that are environmentally sound and progressive.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-183430 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Lovisa, Kronsporre |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Juridiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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