Deforestation in tropical nations has deprived vast territories of wildlife habitats and carbon sinks, but logging and deforestation are not the only activities that pose a threat to remaining forests.
In Indonesia, a country that still has a large amount of tropical forests, almost 60% of deforestation is due to industrial mining. Of the 26 nations examined by the researchers, the Southeast Asian nation was most affected by forest mining, but BrazilGhana and Suriname were also severely affected.
The researchers reached this conclusion by comparing the geographic coordinates of industrial mines in operation from 2000 to 2019 with forest loss data from the Global Forest Change dataset for 26 countries where nearly 77% of all deforestation in the tropics occurred during the same period.
While artisanal, small-scale and illicit mining operations also cause serious damage to the environment, scientists have focused on industrial-scale mining in their research.
They found that in the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan, which has lost a fifth of its forest cover in these two decades, coal mining has caused mining-related deforestation. At the same time, iron ore and gold mining dominated in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, while bauxite and gold mining dominated in Ghana and Suriname.
Deforestation of tropical forests
In addition to the direct impacts on deforestation, more than two-thirds of the countries in the study showed excessive damage to the environment within a radius of more than 50 kilometers around the mines.
“Given the growing demand for minerals, particularly metals for renewable energy and electric mobility technologies, government and industrial policies must take into account the direct and indirect impacts of extraction,” says Anthony Bebbington, professor of environment and society. at Clark University Graduate School of Geography, who was one of the authors of the studying .
“Addressing these impacts is an important tool for conserving tropical forests and protecting the livelihoods of communities living in these forests,” adds Bebbington.
In Indonesia, Brazil and Ghana, tropical deforestation from industrial mining peaked between 2010 and 2014 but continues, further reducing forest cover and harming local ecosystems in other ways.
“Coal mining in Indonesia, in particular, has doubled over this period as production has grown to meet increased demand from China and India,” the scientists note. East Kalimantan province is the center of coal mining in the country, where a large new city is being built on what used to be a rainforest.
more harm than good
“There is a wide range of environmental damage caused by mining operations in addition to deforestation, including destruction of ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, disruption of water sources, production of hazardous waste and pollution,” explains Stefan Giljum, associate professor at Institute of Ecological Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.
“Government permits must take all of this into account: an industrial mine can easily disrupt landscapes and ecosystems. Industrial mining remains a hidden weakness in their strategies to minimize environmental impacts,” he points out.
Hariadi Kartodihardjo, professor of forest policy at Bogor Agricultural University in Indonesia, agrees, explaining that “these findings underscore the ongoing need for robust land-use planning to ensure that mining does not destroy forests or violate human rights.”
By Daniel T. Cross. Article in English