Rusty rails and crumbling brick buildings are all that remain to the Svea coal mine on Norway's Svalbard archipelago, which is turning away from the environmentally harmful industry. "We need to try to restore back to nature the area as it originally was" says former Norwegian environment minister Espen Barth Eide. Svea opened in 1917 and brought wealth to the Arctic islands, before its closure a century later in 2017.
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00:00 [Music]
00:28 While Storoskøy runs the place, we are at the most with barracks for 300 people,
00:36 with canteen, we had airfield with yearly 35 000 passengers, power plant, workshop, storage.
00:44 The concept is to try to make, let the nature take it back or unmake the nature itself.
00:52 That means let creeks run freely, let make sure that avalanches do happen, because that will
01:01 transport more of the sediments down, it will make new creeks. We're standing in the middle of a
01:08 river fan now from the valley back behind us. We want that flood of water, snow and rock
01:19 come down and make the new landscape.
01:22 [Music]
01:47 This is actually the largest nature restoration project to date. We are committed to preserving
01:55 as much as we can of the wilderness nature of Svalbard. And when we have used an area for
02:03 industrial activities and do not use it any longer, we think that these days we need to
02:09 try to restore back to nature the area as it originally was.
02:14 [Music]
02:37 Just what you see here is a result of a very heavy rainfall that was last summer, when you got
02:45 maybe 50-60 millimeters of rain in just 24 hours, which was very unusual before climate change
02:54 started changing the climate up here. Down the hillsides you get much more sediment start moving
03:02 and the small creeks getting more like rivers during the heavy rains. And you can see the
03:08 result here behind me with this crevice-like ravine created in the hillsides. So this is a
03:18 process that transformed the landscape here in Svalbard.
03:23 [Music]
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