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This paper analyses the territory of the southeastern mesoregion of the Pará State, as one of the preferential locus of conflicts that involves different social actors and the mining companies, besides contesting analytically the form of the economic and social development adopted by the Brazilian government in the Amazon of the Pará State at the dawn of the 21st century. The southeastern mesoregion of the Pará State is the most affected by the mining activities of the principal mineral company of the State, the Valle Company. These social and territorial impacts have brought into debate if the mining is the only way of regional development. The conflicts of interests among the populations directly affected and the mineral policy in the Amazon region, have raised a broad debate in the affected societies in the last 30 years of the mineral exploration in the region, confronting the richness and poverty as a remarkable regional landscape, and proposing to reflect about the effects of the mining activities in the mining towns of the Pará State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconciliation can be divided into stages, each stage representing the performance of a mining operation, such as: long-term estimation, short-term estimation, planning, mining and mineral processing. The gold industry includes another stage which is the budget, when the company informs the financial market of its annual production forecast. The division of reconciliation into stages increases the reliability of the annual budget informed by the mining companies, while also detecting and correcting the critical steps responsible for the overall estimation error by the optimization of sampling protocols and equipment. This paper develops and validates a new reconciliation model for the gold industry, which is based on correct sampling practices and the subdivision of reconciliation into stages, aiming for better grade estimates and more efficient control of the mining industry's processes, from resource estimation to final production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several mining companies operating in Brazil have been preparing mine closure plans describing end of life actions to ensure long term physical stability, land rehabilitation and, to a certain extent, socioeconomic measures. Most Brazilian and international guidelines, however, skip early closure and only feature guidance to closure planning after reserve depletion. In this paper, two cases of early closure in Australia are reviewed, causes for early closure are explored, criteria to evaluate preparedness to early mine closure are proposed and tested in two mines. It concludes that, despite recent advances, planning for mine closure seldom take account of early closure risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses the publication of the journal.