Corruption’s Environmental Footprint
How private gain trumps the environment
I don’t know about you, but when I think about corruption, my imagination takes me to an image of a luxurious room, with a tall ceiling and red velvet curtains with golden embroidered details. Expensive art hangs in the walls. In this room, tall men with indistinguishable faces deliberate in half-light. They are older, probably in their sixties and seventies, they wear suits and ties and have evil laughs that could very well belong to a horror movie. These men scheme against the rest of us, they create endless deals that will benefit them, ensuring money and power will continuously flow to them. Societies and the environment bedamned. This childish imaginarium of corruption that lives in my mind, has probably very little to do with what is really going on. However, what is undeniable is that corruption has a negative impact on our global society as well as in the environment. The latter is not always so clear.
Transparency International defines corruption as “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain”¹. This is the most widely adopted definition of corruption. However, several critics, among them the United Nations Development Program have expressed that such a definition is not only too narrow, but also culturally biased. Furthermore, as I’ve explained in more detail in the article -Measuring what wants to remain hidden-, among other consequences, this way of understanding corruption has resulted in limited and flawed action taken to prevent it from happening as well as an excessive focus on petty bribery without considering the broader spectrum and causes of the problem, in the first place. Commonly ignored results of corruption are the devastating impact it has on the environment.
Corruption and environmental degradation
According to a report published by the United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), “corruption takes a serious toll on the environment… From embezzlement during the implementation of environmental programmes, to grand corruption when permits and licenses for natural resources exploitation are issued, to the petty bribery of officials — corruption occurs at any, and every, level. Corruption also makes it possible for environmental and social safeguards to be ignored or bypassed”². All of this is of course incredibly harmful to the environment, but has also disastrous consequences in the livelihood of the local communities tied to that environment. The same report shares among other examples how forests, for example, are directly affected, “trafficking in timber is big business, with South-East Asia bearing the brunt of criminal exploitation. Home to some 7 per cent of the world’s old-growth forests and many unique tree species, the region is experiencing the fastest deforestation rate on Earth, with illicit logging a contributing factor”³. As we live in a world where the effects of environmental destruction are not bound to socio-political lines, the planet as a whole is impacted by the degradation of each individual region.
A study ranking 122 countries’ environmental performance, compiled by the Environmental Task Force of the World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders for Tomorrow together with the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the Center for Earth Science Information at Columbia University was reviewed by Transparency International, finding that “the more affected it [a country] is by corruption, the poorer a country’s environmental performance”⁴. In some cases the effects of corruption are slow and steady environmental degradation, and others have massive, fast and violent consequences. One of those cases was the collapse of a mining Dam in Brazil.
A mining disaster in Brazil and its ties to corruption
In January 2019, 270 people were killed when a dam collapsed near the city of Brumadinho. The dam was part of a project run by Vale, one of the largest mining companies on the planet, with more than 36 billion dollars of net revenues generated in 2018⁵. This was not the first time a dam owned by Vale collapsed, in 2015 another one collapsed “killing 19 people and causing the biggest ecological disaster in Brazil’s history”⁶. According to the official investigation report, Vale knew the risks as the dam did not comply with the recommended level of security and they chose to continue to operate⁷.
I know what you might be thinking, this could probably just qualify as negligence. However, the Brazilian federal police accused Vale, as well as TÜV SÜD of fraud, they “ accused the companies of working with falsified documents attesting to the stability of the dam in Brumadinho, in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, a source with knowledge of the matter said.”⁸ Prior to that, brazilian academics spoke about the mining company having illegally influenced the government to loosen the environmental and safety procedures the mining companies had to go through to operate a project. In fact, three years before the disaster in Brumadinho a new process was created by the Governor of Minas Gerais, Fernando Pimentel, to streamline mining approvals in the Brazilian government, the Superintendence of Prioritized Projects (Suppri). “Pimentel received 1.5 million Brazilian reals (US$254,000 according to current rates) in donations from two companies owned by Vale, Vale Manganes and Vale Energia, in 2014, the last year private companies could donate to electoral campaigns in Brazil.”⁹ Pimentel is far from being the only Brazilian politician to receive such “donations”, according to an investigation carried out by the Brazilian news paper Estadao, mining companies spent almost 15 million reals in donations to political campaigns in the state of Minas Gerais alone.
Before the creation of the Suppri, licenses for mining projects of complex mining projects could take years. The process was meant to take multiple stages of assessments and hundreds of documents and studies needed to be made to insure the safety of a project. With the Suppri they only took months and a single assessment stage. The result, the loss of 270 lives as well one of Brazil’s worst environmental disasters. Forests were destroyed and rivers have been polluted by the toxic chemicals contained in the tailings dam, with effects that will be felt in the surrounding environment for decades to come.
Pollution and environmental degradation linked to corruption is everywhere
According to an article published by The New York times, reported that “China has blamed fraud in project approvals and failure to apply emission control measures for rising pollution”¹⁰. A government investigation into pollution control approvals for construction projects found violations in almost 40 percent of the cases it reviewed. Furthermore, environmental experts showed that fraud and failure to enforce the law are major contributors to rising pollution levels in the country. Even though decades of economic expansion in China have given prosperity to hundreds of millions of people, China has one of the world’s most polluted soil, air and water.
Furthermore, a paper that conducted research on the influence on environmental sustainability of diverse indicators of corruption in the 16 countries that make up Southern Africa between 2010 and 2017, found an undeniable link between environmental degradation and corruption. “Overall, this paper consent to global reports explaining how Southern African environments are gradually deteriorating by putting corruption as one central practice causing extensive damage.”¹¹ In the paper, researchers analyse two proxies for corruption: the Corruption Index and Corruption Ranking and their correlation to environmental degradation.
I could go on and on with discussing specific cases in which corruption has a direct negative impact on the environment like Chile’s lithium policies for example, and many more. But more than anything, what I want to stress is the correlation, regardless of location, between corruption and environmental degradation. “Contrary to popular opinion, corruption is not only political and does not always necessarily involve money”¹². What is maybe even more concerning is the fact that developing countries is where most of the natural resources we have left are located, and it is here where corruption becomes a major culprit in environmental degradation¹³.
[1] What is Corruption (Transparency International, 2020)
[2] [3] Corruption and the Environment (UNODC, n.d)
[5] [6] Behind Vale’s Deadly Dams, a Wave of Lobbying (ANGELO, Maurício. 2020)
[8] Brazil police accuse Vale and TÜV SÜD of fraud before dam burst (NOGUEIRA, Marta. Reuters, 2019)
[9] Behind Vale’s Deadly Dams, a Wave of Lobbying (ANGELO, Maurício. 2020)
[12] [13] Corruption and the Environment (LEITAO, Alexandra. Universidade Católica Portuguesa. 2016)
