For links to member groups of the London Mining Network, see the About page on this website.
Useful sources of information about London-listed mining companies
Mines and Communities is an international network of communities impacted by mining companies, and organisations supporting those communities. Its main work is the hosting of the Mines and Communities website, which contains a vast amount of information about the damaging activities of hundreds of mining companies around the world and the strategies which communities are using to resist destructive mining projects. The MAC website contains a section on mine finance, which includes an important and frequently updated report by Nostromo Research, From Money to Metal, listing which investors are funding which mining companies. The four British member groups of MAC – Down to Earth, Partizans, PIPLinks and the Society of St Columban – are also members of London Mining Network.
Need to know which banks and institutions are funding which mining companies – and where? From Money to Metal is an indispensable, frequently updated database with helpful analysis.
Business and Human Rights Resource Centre
The non-profit Business & Human Rights Resource Centre runs a free online portal to bring together and demystify lawsuits from across the world alleging human rights abuses by companies. The portal summarises cases in non-legal language, giving the positions of each side. It also presents special commentaries by experts. Cases profiled include London-listed mining company BHP Billiton, sued in Australia and Papua New Guinea over pollution by its mine in Papua New Guinea.
For information about coal mining and use
Dark Materials: the consequences of clinging to coal: a report for the Mines and Communities network.
CoalSwarm is a useful website for information on coal: an on-line collaborative information clearinghouse on U.S. and international coal mines, plants, companies, politics, impacts, and alternatives.
Related organisations
ActionAid is an international anti-poverty agency whose aim is to fight poverty worldwide. Among other things, it works with communities in South Africa affected by British-based Anglo American’s subsidiary Anglo Platinum and supports communities in India struggling against London-listed mining company Vedanta plc.
Amnesty runs a Business and Human Rights campaign. It believes that all companies have a responsibility to respect human rights in their operations. It believes that the business community also has a wider responsibility – moral and legal – to use its influence to promote respect for human rights. It aims to change law and regulations to ensure that companies are accountable for the human rights impacts of their operations.
BHP Billiton Watch is an informal network of communities and organisations across the world who are concerned about the impacts of the world’s largest diversified resources company (active in mining, oil and gas).
CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) runs a campaign on mining, called Unearth Justice.
The Coal Action Network is formed of Groups and Individuals resisting coal mining and infrastructure in the UK.
In the face of dangerous climate change caused by human activity, the Coal Action Scotland collective exists to challenge the advancement of coal as an energy source. It aims to inform people about the dangers posed by new coal, promote alternatives, work with those involved, and directly challenge new coal exploitation from source to point of use. Coal Action Scotland is part of the Coal Action Network.
Corporations are one of the most potent forces dictating and circumscribing how our lives are lived and undermining the survival of the world’s ecosystems. Ways of effectively challenging their power and fighting for real democracy are being constricted. This project, run by LMN member group Corporate Watch, aims to explore the ways in which corporations exercise power over the decisions made in what we call a democracy, and the ways in which their ideologies and discourses facilitate this by co-opting and/or suppressing people’s active democratic participation.
Environmental Investigation Agency
The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) is a London-based international campaigning organisation committed to investigating and exposing environmental crime.
The aim of the European Network for Indigenous Australian Rights (ENIAR) is to promote awareness on indigenous issues and to provide information for Indigenous Australians about Europe and international organisations.
The role of mining companies in Indonesian-controlled West Papua is one of the issues of greatest concern for those working for Papuan independence.
Friends of the Earth England Wales and Northern Ireland
FoE’s corporates campaign aims to challenge the power of huge corporations, among them mining companies.
Friends of the Earth Netherlands (Milieudefensie) is a non-governmental (NGO) environmental organisation with more than 90,000 members and supporters and eighty local groups, conducting campaigns on climate change, globalisation, traffic, agriculture and conservation of the countryside.
Occupy London Stock Exchange, famous for its camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London, is critical of the enormous inequalities generated by the current financial system. Occupy organise talks and activities to draw attention to the negative impacts of companies listed on the London Stock Exchange and other aspects of the global economy.
Phulbari Resistance is an initiative of BanglaPraxis in solidarity with the communities resisting a proposed open pit coal mine in Phulbari, Bangladesh. Asia Energy Corporation (Bangladesh Pty Ltd), a hundred percent owned subsidiary of London-listed GCM Resources Plc, is proposing the project. GCM is backed by a number of private banks and hedge funds: RAB Capital, UBS AG, Credit Suisse, Barclays Plc etc.
Protestbarrick.net serves as a portal to groups researching and organizing around mining issues, particularly involving Barrick Gold. It contains news articles, testimonies, and backgrounders about Barrick’s operations worldwide. The administrators of this site are volunteers with sincere concerns for communities negatively impacted by Barrick’s operations.
Saami Resources is a website about the contested ownership and use of Saami traditional lands and resources. The Saami people are the Indigenous people of Sápmi, Saamiland, covering the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Penninsula of Russia. Saami areas in Sweden are currently experiencing an explosion in mining and windpower development. There has been an increase in both Scandinavian and foreign companies in prospecting, mining and windpower.
SEAD (Scottish Education and Action for Development)
SEAD has two main aims:
* To challenge the causes of poverty, social injustice and environmental degradation
* To support the community-based movement for positive social change – people collectively tackling challenges which have both a local and global perspective.
Survival International campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples, including peoples threatened by mining projects. Survival has for a long time supported Bushmen in Botswana resisting diamond mining on their land, and it is now also campaigning against Vedanta plc’s activities on tribal land in Orissa, India.
War on Want fights poverty in developing countries in partnership and solidarity with people affected by globalisation. It campaigns for human rights and against the root causes of global poverty, inequality and injustice. In 2007 it published reports on the role of Anglo American (Anglo American: the Alternative Report) and other London-listed mining companies, (Fanning the Flames), in exacerbating conflict and human rights abuses around the world, as part of its Corporations and Conflict campaign.