A slew of applications by a little-known mining group to explore for critical minerals in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, including within the buffer zone of a nature reserve, has alarmed environmental groups and activists. They warn that the remote and water-scarce region, a globally significant biodiversity hotspot with unique ecosystems and exceptional plant diversity, risks being treated as barren desert. The seven applications from Johannesburg-based Umboso cover a range of minerals considered critical for manufacturing renewable energy components, including cobalt (essential for making lithium-ion batteries), iron ore (used in steelmaking), gallium and germanium (used in making solar panels and cells), uranium, and rare earths needed to make magnets for wind turbines. Prospecting for these minerals could turn the Northern Cape into a “Wild West” for extractive industries, said Liziwe McDaid, strategic lead at the environmental justice organization Green Connection, which has brought several successful court cases against mine prospecting elsewhere in the country. The Umboso Group, which only registered as a company in 2023 and does not publicly list any previous mining experience, applied in February to prospect on seven tracts of land in the Northern Cape — in one case inside the 5-kilometer (3-mile) buffer zone of Gamsberg Nature Reserve, which was set up to safeguard the Nama Karoo and Succulent Karoo biomes. A springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis) in Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, Northern Cape province. Image by Charles J. Sharp/Sharp Photography via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Thevha Sustainable Services, an environmental impact consultancy also based in Johannesburg, was hired…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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