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Indonesia, Brazil biggest culprits in forest loss linked to industrial mining: Study
In the first study to quantify the impact of industrial mining on tropical forest loss, an international team of scientists found that just four countries are largely to blame: Brazil,Indonesia, Ghana and Suriname.
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Firefighters exstinguish a peat-land fire in Pekanbaru, Riau province, on February 1, 2018, one of 73 detected hotspots causing haze on the island of Sumatra. The haze is an annual problem in Indonesia caused by fires set in forest and on carbon-rich peatland in Indonesia to clear land for palm oil and pulpwood plantations. (AFP/Wahyudi)
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ndustrial-scale mining for materials such as coal, gold, and iron ore is spurring tropical deforestation, with once-impenetrable forest cleared for mines and access roads, new research shows.
In the first study to quantify the impact of industrial mining on tropical forest loss, an international team of scientists found that just four countries are largely to blame: Brazil,Indonesia, Ghana and Suriname.
Together, the four forest-rich nations accounted for roughly 80 percent of tropical deforestation caused by large-scale mining operations from 2000 to 2019, according to the study published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
While at least 70 percent of deforestation is done to clear land for agriculture, the scientists called out industrial mining as an emerging concern due to the growing global appetite for minerals used in clean-energy technologies to combat climate change.
"The energy transition is going to require very large amounts of minerals - copper, lithium, cobalt - for decarbonized technologies," said coauthor Anthony Bebbington, a geographer at Clark University in Massachusetts. "We need more planning tools on the parts of governments and companies to mitigate the impacts of mining on forest loss."
Already, mines worldwide extract more than twice the amount of raw materials than they did in 2000, the study said.
For the study, the researchers studied global satellite images and data tracking forest loss alongside location information for industrial-scale mining operations from the past two decades. The study did not measure the impacts from small-scale and artisanal mining, which can also be a challenge as pollution goes unregulated.
