Mining and protected areas: licence polygons screened against World Heritage, protection classes and wetlands
Mining meets protected areas at the licence boundary. ICMM's company members have committed since 2003 not to explore or mine in World Heritage properties and to respect legally designated protected areas — a commitment restated in the 2024 Nature position statement. In the EU, the Critical Raw Materials Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1252) promises strategic extraction projects a permit-granting process of at most 27 months, but the environmental impact assessment sits outside that clock and starts from the same question: what does the licence area touch? ERWAY Legality Assessment answers it per polygon — licence, concession, pit, tailings footprint — from records, before the application is written.
Each polygon is checked against international protected-area records with their protection class, World Heritage sites, biosphere reserves and global geoparks with their footprint's confidence, protected wetlands by official boundary or disc, and land-tenure records for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. A natural World Heritage property is tier 1 and prohibited; a strict-protection area under categories Ia to IV likewise; a sustainable-use area or an official wetland boundary is tier 3, restricted; a recognised Indigenous territory carries the consent flag. Sites on the List of World Heritage in Danger are flagged. The World Heritage check page details the footprint logic; the protection categories page covers the tier each class produces.
The World Heritage no-go commitment, made verifiable
A no-go commitment is only as good as the map behind it. A heritage property is published as a centre point and a size, not as a boundary, so the product computes an equal-area circle with a confidence rating and labels every such finding as approximate; the buffer zone and the surroundings are reported as near and vicinity bands, with their default distances named. A low-confidence circle can never make a polygon prohibited on its own — it raises a question, which is exactly what a no-go screening should surface.
Before the CRMA clock starts
The 27-month limit for extraction projects (15 months for processing and recycling) does not include the time the developer spends preparing the environmental impact assessment report, and the first wave of 47 strategic projects designated in March 2025 showed how many applications reach designation before that report exists. A licence polygon screened against protected areas, wetlands and designations at the feasibility stage tells the developer what the assessment will have to address — and which alternatives to drop. The EIA screening page follows the permit from there.
What remains
The environmental impact assessment, the appropriate assessment for any Natura 2000 site, the mining permit, the water permit and the community agreement are the authority's process and the company's application. The screening is preliminary against international records; where the national register or the mining cadastre is the authority, the page tells you to consult it. What it settles is which polygons carry a designation the no-go policy or the permit will turn on.