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Assessing Mining-Related Risks in the Prestea Huni-Valley Municipality of Ghana

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Assessing Mining-Related Risks in the Prestea Huni-Valley Municipality of Ghana FACULTY OF ENGINEERING AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT Department of Computer and Geospatial Sciences Assessing Mining-related Risks in the Prestea Huni-Valley Municipality of Ghana Faustina Lina Yeboah 2020 Degree project, Advanced level (Master degree, one year), 15 HE Geomatics Master Programme in Geomatics Supervisor: Nancy Joy Lim Examiner: Andrew Mercer Co-examiner: Markku Pyykönen i Preface First, I thank God almighty without whom I could not have finished this work. I must say thank you to Brian Killough (PhD) of the NASA and the Africa Regional Data Cube for the resources and time spent in support of my research. I acknowledge the Center for Scientific and Industrial Research in Ghana for providing data for my work. I also appreciate Jones Mantey (PhD) for readily providing me with his data to support my work. I am grateful to my supervisor Nancy Joy Lim (PhD) for her patience and time spent guiding me through this study. Many thanks to my examiner Mr. Andrew Mercer for his constructive input and feedback. I acknowledge the Swedish Institute for their scholarship program; Swedish Institute Scholarships for Global Proffessionals (SISGP) which made this education possible. I thank all my friends and family for their support. ii Abstract The purpose of this study was to assess the risks caused by illegal gold mining activities (galamsey) in the Prestea Huni-Valley Municipality in Ghana with Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques. Satellite imagery together with vegetation indices and the Australian Water Observation from Space (WOFS) algorithm was used to identify 3577 cells of potential galamsey sites in the Prestea Huni-Valley municipality. Eight mining risk factors (proximity to galamsey sites, rivers, forests, urban areas, static water level, precipitation, erosion, and slope) were considered as important factors to assess galamsey induced risks using Multicriteria Analysis (MCA) and GISwaps. Analytic Hierarchy Process was used to generate criteria weights and proximity to galamsey sites obtained the largest weight. Sensitivity Analysis performed showed that the criteria used were robust although slope was particularly sensitive. In GISwaps, trade-offs were performed in six steps to cancel out the criteria until one remained. Risk maps obtained from both methods were fairly consistent as forest areas, rivers, and urban areas were found to be in the highest risk zones in MCA and GISwaps. Further investigations must be undertaken to protect human life as well as to protect water and forest resources. Keywords: Galamsey, MCA, GISwaps iii Table of contents Preface .................................................................................................................ii Abstract .............................................................................................................. iii Table of contents ................................................................................................... iv 1 Introduction ....................................................................................................1 1.1 Statement of the problem .............................................................................4 1.2 Significance of the study ...............................................................................4 1.3 Purpose of the study ....................................................................................5 1.4 Research questions ......................................................................................5 2 Theory ..........................................................................................................6 2.1 Understanding ASM ....................................................................................6 2.2 The Nature of Galamsey and its operations ........................................................7 2.3 Mining Related Hazards and their Contributing Factors .........................................9 2.3.1 Slope Instability ...................................................................................9 2.3.2 Acid Mine Drainage, Surface, and Groundwater pollution ............................. 10 2.4 Studies on Mining Impacts in Ghana ............................................................... 10 2.5 Remote Sensing and GIS applications to mining studies ....................................... 11 2.6 Spatial Multicriteria Analysis ........................................................................ 12 2.7 The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) ........................................................... 13 2.8 Issues with Model Uncertainty ..................................................................... 15 2.9 Even swaps ............................................................................................. 16 3 Methods ....................................................................................................... 18 3.1 Study area .............................................................................................. 18 3.2 Data and Software Used ............................................................................. 19 3.3 Identifying Galamsey Locations (Hazards) ........................................................ 20 3.3.1 Cloud Statistics .................................................................................. 20 3.3.2 Median Mosaics for Baseline and Analysis Composites .................................. 21 3.4 Data Preparation and Image Classification ........................................................ 21 3.5 Deriving Factor Maps ................................................................................ 22 3.5.1 Proximity to galamsey sites ................................................................... 23 3.5.2 Proximity to Rivers ............................................................................ 23 3.5.3 Proximity to Urban areas ..................................................................... 24 3.5.4 Static Water Level (SWL) .................................................................... 25 3.5.5 Proximity to Forests ........................................................................... 26 3.5.6 Precipitation ..................................................................................... 27 3.5.7 Slope .............................................................................................. 29 3.5.8 Modeling Erosion ............................................................................... 30 3.6 Obtaining Criteria Weights ......................................................................... 32 3.7 MCA and Sensitivity analysis ........................................................................ 33 3.8 Data Preparation for GISwaps ...................................................................... 33 4 Results ........................................................................................................ 38 iv 4.1 Spatial Distribution of Galamsey in the Prestea Huni-Valley Municipality ................. 38 4.2 Validation of Notebook Results .................................................................... 40 4.3 MCA results ............................................................................................ 41 4.4 Sensitivity Analysis .................................................................................... 42 4.5 GISwaps results ........................................................................................ 44 4.6 MCA vs GISwaps results ............................................................................. 45 5 Discussion .................................................................................................... 48 5.1 Validation of galamsey sites ......................................................................... 48 5.2 Galamsey in the Prestea Huni-Valley municipality ............................................. 49 5.3 Relevant criteria, MCA and GISwaps methods .................................................. 50 5.4 Sensitivity Analysis .................................................................................... 51 5.5 Galamsey Hazard in the Prestea Huni-Valley Municipality .................................... 52 6 Conclusions .................................................................................................. 53 References .......................................................................................................... 55 Appendix A ...........................................................................................................1 Appendix B ...........................................................................................................1 v 1 Introduction Mining, like agriculture, is one of humankind’s oldest activities. It is the extraction of mineral deposits from or beneath the surface of the earth (Donnelly, 2018). It has been undertaken in many countries for several centuries as the earth is replete with many mineral resources. Mineral materials may be grouped into five categories; iron and ferro- alloy metals, non-ferrous metals, precious metals, industrial minerals, and mineral fuels. Minerals are considered the lifeblood of any economy with a total of 17.2 billion metric tons of various commodities produced globally in 2017 and Africa producing approximately 1 billion metric tons (Reichl & Schatz, 2019). Products mined are major raw materials essential in fields like energy production and industrial machinery. As such, mining activities are of significant
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