Electronic Theses and Dissertations (PhDs)

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    Responsible mining and sustainability in Nigeria: the case of Bitumen
    (2020) Akinyosoye, Oluwole Olafusi; Wafer, Alex
    The last few decades have been marked by a sense of urgency regarding the sustainable use of the earth’s natural resources. During this period, the mining and minerals industries have received particular attention in relation to their perceived destructive impact on the environment. Within this context, the discourse of responsible mining has relatively recently emerged as a possible route towards more sustainable mineral exploitation that could be the basis for sustainable development in the future. For some commentators the idea of responsible mining is an oxymoron: mineral exploitation is always environmentally too costly. For other commentators, effective management of mineral resources provides a realistic path to sustainable development for resource rich but economically poor nations. One of the key components of responsible mining is "good governance": i.e. the presence of a broadly legitimate and democratic form of governing society, which includes a balance of power in the administration of a country between the effective institutions of state and civil society. However, the past decades have suggested that there is an inherent crisis of poor governance in many developing countries, which has been identified as one of the drivers of change to initiate sustainable development. This research report offers an exploration of these two intersecting concepts of responsible mining and governance in Nigeria, in the context of the proposed economic diversification strategy through non-oil and solid minerals development. The study focusses on what might be termed the paradox of sustainable futures in Nigeria: with the proposed exploitation of bitumen reserves in a country that has a poor social and environmental reputation for oil mining. What are the prospects that bitumen could provide resources for sustainable growth in Nigeria? Despite relatively high rates of growth in the Nigerian economy in the past few years, the Nigerian economy has traditionally been overly dependent on oil and gas extraction, and the gradual decline over the past two decades has seen an overall decline in development in the country. As a result, the government has identified other resource potentials, in this context, to exploit the vast bitumen reserves in Nigeria. Whilst the idea to mine bitumen spawns the rhetoric of development in the area and huge revenues to the government for national development purposes, there is a need to explore the paradox of development from this form of mining. More importantly is the impending impact on the indigenous people, which is influenced by certain factors, especially the network of governance, to address the challenges of minerals development in Nigeria. In this context, this study is an attempt to explore the possibilities of and anxieties regarding sustainable futures in the context of the impending bitumen exploitation. The study involved 3 months of field research in Agbabu in Ondo State, Nigeria, one of the areas that will be most affected by the proposed bitumen mining. The area is largely rural, with traditional forms of land ownership and farming practices that are integral to the economic opportunities within the community. Thus, to obtain detailed knowledge of the dynamics of exploiting bitumen, this study applied a qualitative research design to conduct a case-study research on Agbabu in Ondo state, Nigeria. The review of relevant literature, focus group discussion, in-depth interviews, and key informant interviews were relevant tools that provided the data for the study. With these tools, the study gathered data from a range of respondents which included the local population, government officials and professionals who hold esteemed positions in this study concerning their experiences and opinions’ on the proposed bitumen project. The study found that despite the welcome idea of bitumen development, local mining communities still struggle with issues of being marginalised and excluded from decision-making processes in matters related to their indigenous space.
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    Remote sensing survey of archaeological sites in the Shashi- Limpopo Region
    (2020) Thabeng, Olaotse Lokwalo
    The African continent is rich with archaeological heritage, which needs to be preserved for the current and future generations. The majority of archaeological heritage sites in Africa are facing disappearance due to a number of challenges including looting, destruction from developments, expansion of agricultural land and natural hazards. Documentation and monitoring of archaeological heritage sites, therefore, is of paramount importance for effective site management and preservation. However, archaeological heritage sites in the continent are poorly documented and monitored due to a number of factors including lack of funds by heritage management institutions, lack of trained personnel and inaccessibility of some areas due to conflicts or land ownership rights. Traditionally, the documentation and monitoring of archaeological heritage sites in Africa have been done through fieldwork, which is costly, time-consuming and difficult to carry out over large areas. Remote sensing offers a relatively fast, cheap, systematic and reproducible method of surveying and monitoring archaeological sites over large and/or restricted areas. Remote sensing techniques are used to identify earth surface features based on their spectral signature, which is the variation of reflection or emittance of materials’ electromagnetic energy. Spectral signatures for identifying archaeological sites are not universal, and an assessment of the applicability of remote sensing techniques in different archaeological landscapes is needed. The aim of this study, therefore, was to investigate the potential of using remote sensing techniques to document archaeological sites previously occupied by farming communities, which are traditionally associated with the Iron Age period in Southern Africa, using the Shashi-Limpopo case study. The first part of this study gives a review of the use of remote sensing in the African archaeological context. Despite it being a fast, cost-effective and systematic method of survey, the results of this study have demonstrated that remote sensing is not widely used in archaeological applications in Africa. The aforementioned situation calls for studies investigating the potential of using remote sensing techniques to fast track archaeological site survey, documentation and monitoring in the continent. The chemical composition of materials characterising different features have more or less subtle variations that, in turn influence the spectral behaviour of soil. This is an important principle that can be used for distinguishing archaeological soils from non-archaeological soils and can potentially help in discriminating different archaeological signatures. As such, the second part of this study investigated the possibility of using field spectrometer measurements to discriminate middens, non-vitrified dung, vitrified dung and non-sites (natural soils) characterising archaeological landscapes previously occupied by farming communities. It then investigated the presence of differences in the chemical composition of elements between middens, non-sites, vitrified dung and non-vitrified dung. The findings indicated that there is a statistically significant difference in the concentration of soil elements between non-sites, middens, vitrified dung and non-vitrified dung byres. They also indicated that some bands in the visible and shortwave infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum important bands for predicting the aforementioned archaeological sites and non-archaeological sites. In the third part of this study, the ability of multispectral sensors to discriminate archaeological and non-archaeological features in Shashi-Limpopo confluence area was investigated using field spectral data resampled to the spectral resolutions of common multispectral satellites namely GeoEye, Landsat 8 OLI, RapidEye, Sentinel-2, SPOT 5 and WorldView-2. This is because the spectral and spatial resolutions of various multispectral sensors determine the size and the type of archaeological data a sensor can detect. As such, another goal of this study was to identify multispectral sensors with the optimum spectral resolutions for detecting middens, non-vitrified dung, vitrified dung and non-sites. Additionally, the performance of advanced classification algorithms (random forest and support vector machines) in discriminating middens, non-vitrified dung, vitrified dung and non-sites was also investigated. The results proved the possibility of using multispectral satellites in mapping middens, non-sites, vitrified dung and non-vitrified dung sites. These results initiated the need to upscale the test to actual satellite images. The fourth part of this study assessed the possibility of prospecting for archaeological sites previously occupied by farming communities in the Shashi-Limpopo Confluence Area, using a very high-resolution satellite WorldView-2 image. The findings have shown that WorldView-2 satellite images and advanced classification algorithms can be used in prospecting for archaeological sites previously occupied by farming communities in Shashi-Limpopo Confluence Area. Finally, the ability of geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA) based on random forest and support vector machines, to discriminate archaeological and non-archaeological features on a very high-resolution satellite WorldView-2 image was investigated. The results of this study demonstrated the robust ability of the GEOBIA to integrate spatial attributes into the classification model improves the chances of separating materials with limited spectral contrast. Generally, this study has shown that remote sensing techniques can be used to map archaeological landscapes characterised by middens, non-vitrified dung, vitrified dung and non-sites. This will help archaeological heritage managers and researchers to document and monitor sites in archaeological landscapes characterised by the aforementioned features in a fast, systematic, reproducible and cost-effective manner