Diamond giant De Beers has launched its first conference on the research of diamond routes in South Africa, Commodity Online reported.

Some 120 diamond industry delegates, gathered at the De Beers Campus, just south of Johannesburg, to present papers on scientific research undertaken on the eight properties making up the diamond route.

The diamond route, as envisioned by De Beers, will link eight sites across South Africa in the only mining-related ecology route in the world.

The planned diamond route stretches from Namaqualand on the Northern Cape west coast, to Kimberley, Benfontein, Rooipoort and Dronfield Reserves, and The Big Hole Experience; then north to the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, west to Brenthurst Gardens in Johannesburg, eastwards to Ezemvelo Nature Reserve near Bronkhorstspruit, and north to the Venetia Limpopo Reserve in northern Limpopo Province.



The conference was headed by De Beers Deputy Chairman and Chairman of the empowerment company, Manne Dipico.

Dipico said that the conference "illustrated the irony, that while it is accepted that mining impacts the environment, it is also the mining industry that is often an agent for the responsible conservation of ecologically significant areas in South Africa, and for making privately-owned areas available to scientists for their established research projects, as well as to visitors seeking to commune with nature."

Strilli Oppenheimer, Patron and founder of the Diamond Route notion, added that it was "gatherings such as these help give the body its academic wings… It is the liberation of knowledge that may otherwise not be exposed to the wider public.”

“I expect that diamond mining will contribute more to ecology going forward, able to do so based on the investments in time and money made by past generations," Dipico said.

"I hope for knowledge to flow out of the Diamond Route, be enriched and flow back in a great circle of life we seek to create from the good diamonds do. We will continue to host groups from communities near our mines and to promote an appreciation of the classroom of nature around us,” he concluded.