Coal-fired electricity generation loses its popularity as a result of the climate change facts, international agreements, raised environmental awareness, and considerable price drop in the renewable energy technologies.... [ view full abstract ]
Coal-fired electricity generation loses its popularity as a result of the climate change facts, international agreements, raised environmental awareness, and considerable price drop in the renewable energy technologies. However, in some of the developed countries like the USA and the transition economies like China, Turkey, and India; coal-fired electricity generation is still expected to play an important role in the electricity supply due to domestic availability of coal, energy security policies, and rising energy demand. Therefore, the hard coal and lignite mining operations are foreseen to expand in some of these countries, such as Turkey. The exploitation of coal with conventional mining methods causes negative short- and long-term environmental, social and economic impacts at the local and regional levels. Thus, these are required to be controlled, analyzed, reported, and monitored, systematically during all stages of mining. In this respect, this study presents a methodological framework for monitoring the change in the environmental, social and economic parameters in the project area with respect to the baseline conditions in order to assess the change in sustainability level over years. The framework is mainly structured on the integral use of the sustainability indicators and the land use land cover (LULC) maps for evaluating the pre- and post-mining periods in terms of environmental, social and economic sustainability. In order to monitor the change in sustainability quantitatively, the selected indicators are needed to correspond to a quantitative measure. The quantitative measure can be obtained by developing LULC maps, which is one of the effective methods for monitoring the surface impacts of the mining activities in large areas. Thus, obtaining accurate LULC maps for various time frames is significantly important for monitoring the land disturbance during the life of mine. For this purpose, remote sensing image analysis methods are used for the satellite images of the mining area obtained in various time frames. Two change detection methods, namely, the post-classification change detection based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Change-Detection-Driven Transfer Learning Approach (CDTL) are used to detect the change in LULC classes in the study. The framework is presented with the case of the Afşin-Elbistan Coal Basin (AECB) in Turkey. The mining operations in the AECB are performed with surface mining methods, where relatively large land disturbance occurs. The LULC changes in the AECB for the years of between 1984 and 2014 are analyzed utilizing satellite images, as the mining operations were started in 1984 in the basin. Hence, the sustainability level of 1984 indicates the baseline sustainability level in the basin before the mining operations have been started. The obtained sustainability scores for the following years are compared with the baseline sustainability level for two change detection methods. The results highlight the importance of monitoring the sustainability quantitatively, where a considerable change in the environmental and social sustainability is detected for the 30 years period and less change in the economic sustainability, is found for the AECB. The obtained results also serve for initiating improvement actions and for integrating them into the decision-making process for the future planning in order to improve sustainability.
1c. Assessing sustainability (indicators and reporting)
