The United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development meetings in New York in the Spring of 2000 would be an excellent forum to introduce a proposal for a coalition of NGOs to consense on certification practices for natural resource industries. For example, many streams and rivers are over-sedimented due to dams, farming, road building, logging and previous mining practices. Placer miners that mine in present rivers and streams have the ability to restore degraded waterways in the process of extracting gold and other heavy metals. Sediment can be pumped out of the waterway, stream hydrology can be restored. Dammed rivers do not have the annual flushing flows which make possible the migration of sediment to the ocean.
Dammed rivers are hence unhealthy.
With properly designed mining operations, today's river dredger can mechanically remove the sediment much like nature did prior to dams. The gold and other minerals can pay for this river restoration and stewardship. The Coalition for Green Gold believes that gold should be certified as being ecologically mined if it is mined in such a fashion as to have, at worst, zero negative impact and most often a positive impact on local ecosystems and human communities. CGG would like to see the Ecological mining NGO that was proposed to NGOs at the UN CSD meetings several years ago develop consensus on this concept and then create specific certification standards and practices which local NGOs could adhere to any where in the world.