
The paper published by Ladewig et al. (2024), with Arild Angelsen, a Steering Committee member of the Tropical Forest Arena, as co-author, revealed that approximately 6.6% of forest loss in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is caused by artisanal mining.
The DRC is the fifth most biodiverse country in the world and harbors the second-largest rainforest globally. Yet, beneath these forests lie gold and critical minerals essential for producing electronic devices such as laptops and smartphones.
Mineral extraction primarily occurs at artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sites. The International Peace Information Service currently reports 2,700 of these mines across five eastern provinces, with 332,000 miners directly involved.
Operations for mineral extraction pose significant threats to forest ecosystems, including: declines in vertebrate populations due to overhunting, and egradation of aquatic biodiversity caused by the use of mercury, cyanide, and sediment runoff that pollutes rivers.
Deforestation in the DRC is primarily driven by small-scale rotational agriculture and artisanal mining. Small-scale agriculture typically occurs along roads and expands into surrounding forests, while artisanal mining begins in newly discovered mineral deposits in remote forests. Once a deposit is identified, people move into the area and establish "improvised tarpaulin settlements," which sometimes grow into larger towns.
This study overcame the challenges of assessing ASM's impact on deforestation by utilizing satellite imagery and a difference-in-differences (DID) model. The researchers identified 225 forest-based artisanal mines using temporally explicit data on post-forest land use between 2001 and 2020. They demonstrated that forest clearing for mining activities is significantly overshadowed by the cumulative impacts of other, triggered land uses.
Ladewig, M., Angelsen, A., Masolele, R.N. et al. Deforestation triggered by artisanal mining in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nat Sustain 7, 1452–1460 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01421-8