July 2019, ScientificAmerican.com 47avoiding these protected areas was not enough—the forests
were continuing to degrade from lack of active management
and encroaching loggers and charcoal producers. The biodiver-
sity committee grew concerned that the company was not ramp-
ing up its conservation work accordingly. “Species extinction is
QMM’s biggest biodiversity risk,” the committee warned in 2010.
The conservation outlook deteriorated from there. Between
2010 and 2012 QMM was supposed to have made substantial
progress in adding to forest cover through restoration work.
Instead data from the company’s own incremental reviews
show that deforestation had already claimed an area nearly as
large as the protected one in Mandena. One important frag-
ment, in Sainte Luce—home to four of the seven critically en -
dangered species present in QMM’s mining footprint—was on
pace to dwindle from more than 200 hectares to less than 50
hectares by 2024. The warnings captured in the minutes of the
biodiversity committee’s meetings grew more urgent: “HUGE
RISK FOR ACHIEVING NPI,” members wrote in 2012, arguing
that QMM was running out of ways to offset future damage
done by the mine.
Meanwhile a series of technical snafus in Madagascar and a
costly investment blunder in Mozambique, where Rio Tinto
overpaid for a stake in a massive new coal mine, ate into the
company’s bottom line, prompting cost-cutting measures
across the enterprise. Although the environmental program’sfunding was not facing cuts, it seemed to be falling behind any
realistic shot at NPI. Months were lost as Rio Tinto pushed for
QMM to shoulder more responsibility for funding the work on
its own budget.
Even as the mining dredge steadily ate away at the other
fragments in Mandena, QMM had successfully curbed defores-
tation in the protected area to near zero. But Mandena is by far
the easiest of the three sites to manage and the least important
for biodiversity. By 2015 QMM’s Biodiversity Action Plan
warned that achieving NPI required immediately stopping deg-
radation and deforestation in both the offset and avoidance
zones in Petriky and Sainte Luce and dramatically slowing the
loss of forest in the offsets outside the mining area.
Then, in 2016, Rio Tinto officially abandoned NPI as a corpo-
rate mandate. A representative met with QMM’s biodiversity
committee to present a new corporate environmental standard
set to replace NPI, one it framed as “minimizing residual im -
pact.” What, exactly, did that mean?
“It was totally devoid of anything really substantive,” Lowry
recalls. The most Rio Tinto will say publicly is that the answer is
“site-specific”: individual projects can define and pay for their
own environmental management—up to and, if they wish,
including net positive impact.
Jörg Ganzhorn, an ecologist at the University of Hamburg in
Germany who had been collaborating with Rio Tinto and QMM
for more than a decade, was stunned. “I would understand if
you as a mining company do not claim net positive biodiversity
impact. That’s not your job,” he says. But no one had forced Rio
Tinto to tout the standard on its Web site and fly its CEO to
environmental conferences around the globe to speak about the
company’s groundbreaking initiative. To do all that and then
abandon NPI? “That’s when I decided I had to leave,” Ganzhorn
says. That October, he, Lowry and the two other remaining sci-
entists advising Rio Tinto in Madagascar released a statement
abruptly cutting ties with the company.
Soon afterward, Rio Tinto executives circulated a set of talk-
ing points responding to the committee’s resignation, portray-
ing its undoing as a mutual agreement “to refresh the objectives
and focus of the panel.” A new and improved committee would
be formed, with former members lending a hand to shape its
work, the statement said. Lowry was the only former member
still open to being involved going forward. “The stakes are still
very high,” he says. “If I don’t serve on this committee, there will
be zero connection to the work that’s been done over the past
20 to 25 years.”In July 2017 I rode along with two members of QMM’s
environmental team on a tour of Mandena, where a patchwork
of rolling fields, forest fragments and wetlands is steadily giv-
ing way to the hard corners and straight lines of an industrial
site. A Madagascar kestrel perched on a fence post. Rows of eu-
calyptus and acacia saplings formed a grid over the sandy ex-
panse where the mining dredge had passed. Over time QMM
hopes these trees will provide a source of wood and charcoal for
communities that currently depend on forest fragments that
will soon be mined. Just behind the company’s headquarters,
QMM maintains a nursery that supplies it with acacia and eu-
KONRAD WOTHE calyptus, along with native plants it is using in experiments
Nature Picture Library
RIO TINTO’S MINING SITES in Madagascar are home to a
number of imperiled species, including the ring-wearing tree frog
( 1 ), the Antanosy day gecko ( 2 ) and the collared brown lemur ( 3 ).
Some species are known only from areas within the company’s
mining concession.3