Shaheed El Hafed, 19 September 2026 (SPS) – The President of the Sahrawi Observatory for Natural Resources and Environmental Protection, Ms. Yaqouta Al-Mokhtar, said that the Observatory’s new report, entitled “Plunder Footprint: The Environmental Cost of Natural Resource Exploitation in Western Sahara,” introduces a new approach to studying the impacts of natural resource exploitation.
Rather than focusing solely on the value of resources and the entities exploiting them, the report examines the full environmental footprint resulting from extraction, transportation, processing, storage and export operations, as well as the infrastructure and investments associated with them.
She made the remarks during a conference held today, Saturday, at the headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to present the report, in the presence of researchers, experts, representatives of international institutions and organizations, civil society representatives and media professionals.
In her presentation, Ms. Yaqouta Al-Mokhtar explained that the report begins with a question concerning what happens to the environment when natural resources in an ecologically fragile territory become part of production, transportation, export and investment chains that extend beyond the territory.
In this context, she highlighted the concept of the “environmental footprint” as a key analytical approach in the report. For example, the environmental impact of phosphate extraction cannot be confined to the mining site alone; rather, its effects must be traced through processing and transportation operations, infrastructure, storage facilities, ports, shipping and the markets receiving the raw material.
The same applies, according to the speaker, to fisheries, sand extraction, groundwater exploitation, agriculture, industrial projects, renewable energy and water desalination, along with the infrastructure, transport routes and ports associated with these activities.
She stressed that the report approaches the concept of the “plunder footprint” analytically by raising questions about the location, scale and nature of environmental impacts, their duration, and whether they can be reversed or ecosystems restored after damage has occurred. She noted that these questions are particularly important given the fragility of desert, coastal and marine ecosystems, water scarcity and the slow renewal of natural resources.
The Observatory’s President linked this approach to the international legal context of Western Sahara, noting that the territory has remained on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories since 1963, and stressing that the territory’s legal status cannot be separated from discussions concerning its natural resources and environment.
She also emphasized that environmental issues cannot be separated from questions of governance, transparency and accountability. She explained that limited environmental data and difficulties in independently accessing information and conducting scientific monitoring make it difficult to measure accumulated damage, compare it over time and scientifically determine responsibility.
She noted that, in this context, the report reviews the main resources and economic activities, including phosphates, fisheries, sand, water, energy and infrastructure, before examining what it describes as the “cumulative impact”—that is, how different activities interact with one another and, in many cases, how their effects extend beyond the sites where the economic activities take place.
She stressed that one of the report’s key conclusions is that the environmental challenge is linked not only to the existence of economic activity, but also to the absence of sufficient independent environmental data to measure its impacts systematically and over the long term. She therefore described the report as a “research baseline” on which further work can be built, rather than an endpoint.
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