Mapping mercury contamination from mining

In May 2016 Irene Vélez-Torres received a series of alarming telephone calls from residents of the Colombian village of Yolombó, a community of afro-descendent people 100km from the city of Cali. Huge numbers of dead fish were floating in the Ovejas River, a major source of food, and the community wanted to understand what was happening.

‘I did my PhD in that community,’ explains Vélez-Torres, a full professor at the Universidad del Valle in Colombia, who lived in Yolombó for almost a year in 2011. ‘I became part of the community, kind of … it was very, very close and we shared a lot.’

Since completing her PhD, which focused on mining, extractivism and its impacts on the forced mobility of people, Vélez-Torres continued to return to the community and to update them on her academic role as a social scientist in the School of Natural Resources and Environmental Engineering.

‘When they saw the dead fish, they called me to see if I could do something; if I could help them, more like as a friend who has good contacts,’ she explains. ‘They didn’t know that it was related to mining, they just saw the fish and they were wondering, what could that be?