46 Scientific American, July 2019Tinto knew it would stand a better chance of securing the requi-
site mining permits if it could show that it had done due dili-
gence about the extent of environmental damage its mining
would bring about. Botanist Pete Lowry worked with a team of
his colleagues at the Missouri Botanical Garden to collect and
document every plant species they encountered. As the team
found dozens of unfamiliar plants, Lowry says, “it sort of
dawned on us—there are a lot of species that seem to grow on
white sand and nowhere else.” The team was tracing the out-
lines of an ecosystem scarcely known to science. Rio Tinto went
on to partner with top-flight researchers from around the world,
supporting studies on more than 40 previously undescribed
species found in the mining concession.
Despite Rio Tinto’s support for ecological research in Mada-
gascar, by the early 2000s the company’s global track record
had earned it a reputation as an unscrupulous actor in a heavi-
ly polluting industry. In Papua New Guinea, where Rio Tinto
had developed a giant copper mine in the 1980s, protests
brought on by the company’s disparate treatment of white for-
eigners and local workers forced the mine’s closure and helped
to spark a civil war. Thirty years later Rio Tinto is gone, but pol-
lution from the shuttered Panguna mine will still cost an esti-
mated $1 billion to clean up.
It was against this troubled backdrop that Rio Tinto went to
Bangkok in 2004 to announce a pilot conservation initiative in
Madagascar. The company called the strategy net positive
impact (NPI). It pledged to leave the local ecosystems in Man-
dena, Sainte Luce and Petriky—all of which have especially high
biodiversity—better off because of mining than they would have
been without it. In 2005 Rio Tinto began to roll out the particu-
lars of its plan. It would avoid mining altogether in well-pre-
served forest fragments in each of the three sites; undertake
unprecedented ecological restoration of areas cleared during
mining; and invest in biodiversity offsets at several forest sites
elsewhere in the region to compensate for the damage it would
do in the mining zone. The biodiversity committee would serve
to help the company make good on its promise.
The partnership did not sit well with some conservationists.
Barry Ferguson, an environmental researcher then based in
Tolagnaro, saw the arrangement as a kind of mutually beneficial
“greenwashing” whereby scholars with strong conservation bona
fides boosted their research careers with studies funded by QMM.
Other observers were skeptical that net positive impact was a tar-
get Rio Tinto could ever meet in such an ecologically sensitive
area. After all, dozens of plant species are known only from areas
within the mining concession. The existence of a particular spe-
cies of day gecko, Phelsuma antanosy, a tiny dart of neon green
with red stripes and flashes of turquoise on the males, is even
more precarious. Confined to habitat thought to be less than 10
square kilometers, the gecko lays its eggs on a single species of
screw pine and forages for insects on the same tree.
Achieving NPI in Madagascar would be an expensive propo-
sition. Rio Tinto calculated that it would have to leave $1.2 bil-
lion of ilmenite underground to spare the 624 hectares of forest
in the so-called avoidance zones and convert them into protect-
ed areas. Restoring ruined forest and creating offsets would cut
further into its profits.
Yet in promotional materials, the company often argued the
“business case” for NPI, based on a need to show governments
and investors that Rio Tinto is the best firm to carry out projects
with major social and environmental risks. The way Lowry
understood it, “occupying the high ground would give [Rio Tinto]
a commercial advantage.” He became the biodiversity commit-
tee’s president in 2006. Early on Lowry hoped the mine in Mada-
gascar, along with two other Rio Tinto pilot sites for NPI in Mon-
golia and Australia, could help define a new path for the mining
industry’s relationship with the environment at a time when
companies were concerned that social and environmental risks
might lock them out of potentially lucrative sites. “The idea was,
‘We’re a dirty business, everybody knows we’re a dirty business,’ ”
he says. “ ‘What do we need to do to gain access in the future?’ ”
Rio Tinto officially began mining operations there in 2008.But the business case for NPI soon ran headlong
into the business of running a profitable mine. Global financial
markets plunged in the months before Mandena was set to
enter production in December 2008, and Rio Tinto’s stock price
tumbled as the company braced for lower demand. The first
shipments of ilmenite left Madagascar for processing in Cana-
da in May 2009; by the end of the year demand for the mineral
was down 20 percent.
For a while Rio Tinto upheld part of its conservation promise,
steering clear of its designated avoidance zones. But simply FRANCO ANDREONE12