This paper reviews fifty separate studies, globally, on the social impacts arising from the mining sector. These studies have applied different sets of indicators and targets to measure social impacts, and highlight the diversity of issues that could be explored as part of a social impact assessment.
In this case, the study finds the most concerning social aspects of the mining sector to be those related to land use impacts and environmental impacts affecting human health and human rights, while the main positive impacts are benefits from income and employment.
The paper then compares the spectrum of impacts identified across this literature with the indicators being used by various international organizations for assessing and promoting sustainability, such as United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. It finds that impacts on working conditions and human rights tend to be well-covered themes in the international indicator lists, but other key social impacts from mining such as demographic changes and migration are less well covered by these international frameworks.
This paper uses household survey data to provide a distributional analysis of food and energy subsidies and simulate the impact of subsidy reforms on household wellbeing, poverty, and the government’s budget. Survey data comes from the then most recent Libyan Household Expenditure Survey administered by the national statistical agency. It simulates subsidy reforms and estimates the impact on household welfare and the government budget under two scenarios (a 30 percent decrease in the subsidy for each product, and the total elimination of all subsidies).
The analysis focuses only on the direct effects of subsidy reforms, so it likely understates the effects of reforms, especially in the case of the energy sector. The impacts considered are changes in household expenditure and income levels, and government budgets.
It finds, for instance, that the elimination of food subsidies would reduce household expenditure by about 10 percent and double the poverty rate while saving around 2 percent of the government budget. The elimination of energy subsidies would have a similar effect on household welfare, but a larger effect on poverty while government savings would be almost 4 percent of the budget.
It finds that the effects of subsidy reform would be felt most acutely among poorer households, because they spend a much greater share of their total expenditure on subsidized food items than richer households.
Such findings help planners to decide on how best to design and implement subsidy reforms. For instance, the paper argues that subsidy reforms should be complemented by some form of compensation for the poor (such as cash transfers), implemented gradually, and sequenced “product-by-product” rather than as a single, all-inclusive reform.
This study explores the scientific evidence associating mental health conditions and psychiatric illness with climate change, and in doing so highlights examples of a wide range of methods and data that may be used to assess mental health impacts.
It is based on an extensive review of literature focused on links between classical psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, schizophrenia, mood disorder and depression, suicide, aggressive behaviours, despair for the loss of usual landscape, and phenomena related to climate change and extreme weather.
Diverse methods and data were used to assess mental health impacts across the nearly 100 papers included by the review. Methods often combine regression time studies with data obtained from patients or communities through interviews and surveys, or in some cases from social media. Some of the analyses were individual case studies, others were longitudinal or cross-sectional studies.
This paper reviews fifty separate studies, globally, on the social impacts arising from the mining sector. These studies have applied different sets of indicators and targets to measure social impacts, and highlight the diversity of issues that could be explored as part of a social impact assessment.
In this case, the study finds the most concerning social aspects of the mining sector to be those related to land use impacts and environmental impacts affecting human health and human rights, while the main positive impacts are benefits from income and employment.
The paper then compares the spectrum of impacts identified across this literature with the indicators being used by various international organizations for assessing and promoting sustainability, such as United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. It finds that impacts on working conditions and human rights tend to be well-covered themes in the international indicator lists, but other key social impacts from mining such as demographic changes and migration are less well covered by these international frameworks.