About Us

The Federation for a Sustainable Environment (FSE)  is today widely recognised as the most prominent of the environmental activist stakeholders in the mining industry – and its directors are listed amongst the 100 most influential people in Africa’s Mining Industry (MiningMX 2012 & 2013 – “Rainmakers and Potstirrers”) 

Since the FSE’s establishment as a non-profit organisation, it has facilitated hundreds of community engagement workshops, meetings and tours in the West and Far West Rand region. The nature of the FSE’s work was firstly to advocate for behavioural change by the mines that support the post-apartheid policy and legal environment, which resulted in building and maintaining its credibility. This involved sustained non-party political participation in national and international fora on mining related issues, research projects, government committees and task teams, as well as academic involvement and the publishing of academic papers; engagement with key national and international stakeholders and the news media; presentations at international and national conferences; involvement in the drafting of environmental legislation, policies, strategies and regulations, litigation, etc.

Furthermore, the FSE’s work includes environmental awareness campaigns, empowerment of mining-affected communities, skills development and capacitating communities. Empowerment of communities includes information dissemination of impacts and potential impacts of mining, benefits as well as their rights in terms of environmental legislation and how to exercise these rights. Communities, which are characterized by widespread poverty, often have unrealistic expectations namely that unemployed and largely unskilled members of the community will find employment on the mine.  The FSE assisted communities to focus not only on short term benefits but also on inter- and intra-generational equity with its medium- and long-term horizons in order to ensure that the interests of both current and future generations are not compromised. As such, the FSE engaged with the mining affected communities and the mining companies on sustainable post closure land use with its implications for socio-economic and environmental sustainability since 2007 and still ongoing in 2021.

The FSE’s main objective includes:

1. Protecting and promoting environmental health and functional ecosystems for future generations
2. Ensuring that developments involving the consumptive or destructive use of natural resources specifically benefit local residents and parties directly affected by the development
3. Informing all decision making in development, including in planning and monitoring activities that affect local people and natural and environmental resources;
4. Promoting sustainable and just social development as an inseparable consequence of natural resource use development projects
5. Taking action, including legal action, to hold decision makers accountable in situations where development may have negative social, economic or environmental impacts that affect people and the environment 
6. Ensuring that the total cost of the use of natural resources including all externalised and long-term costs of maintaining ecosystem services to local people, are provided for and borne by the project
7. Facilitating the remedying of existing environmental degradation 
8. Mobilising collaborative national and local action among like minded entities and raising and providing funds and legal and technical expertise to support such actions.

The contributions of the FSE to environmental and social justice have been recognised and its directors received a number of environmental
awards since the FSE’s inauguration in 2007 inter alia 

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The FSE’s Privacy Policy in terms of the POPI Act can be viewed and downloaded below.

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