Congo River, Democratic Republic of Congo. Guenther Guni/Getty Images The global push for a transition to green energy has sparked demand for critical minerals such as lithium, vanadium, copper and cobalt. These are needed for electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels. Sub-Saharan Africa hosts about 30% of the world’s mineral reserves, including huge quantities of critical minerals: 92% of all platinum, 36% of all chromium, 54% of all manganese and 56% of all cobalt.
Many critical minerals are concentrated beneath the continent’s biodiverse forests.
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We are conservation scientists researching the impacts on the environment when resources such as timber, minerals or animal species are extracted and used by people. We have spent years tracking how resource demand can reshape fragile ecosystems.
In our most recent study we set out to track exactly how much forest had been lost because of mining across sub-Saharan Africa over 20 years.
We used satellite data to identify 16,627 mining areas in the region. We tracked what happened to the land surrounding the mines between 2001 and 2020. We then compared places where mining was already taking place with similar areas that had not yet been mined but would be in the future. This allowed us to estimate how much deforestation was caused purely by a new mine setting up, rather than by other factors, such as the expansion of farms.
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Our study revealed that between 2001 and 2020, 187,000 hectares of forests were converted to mines in Africa. This is 0.03% of Africa’s forests but is still a massive area – roughly the size of Mauritius.
This number only represents the deforestation by the mine footprint itself (the mine, its pits and tailing ponds where mine waste sludge is stored).
But mines cause far wider damage to the environment. We found that every hectare deforested within a mine’s immediate footprint triggered an additional 34 hectares of forest to be lost from the surrounding region.
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This is because of other activities directly triggered by the establishment of a mine, like road building, new urban settlements and agricultural expansion specifically to accommodate the mine.
Demand for green energy transition minerals like copper and cobalt is expected to grow 40-fold by 2040. So given the sheer quantity of key transition minerals on the African continent this growing demand poses a clear and pressing risk to African forests.
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Healthy forests are carbon sinks; they absorb more carbon from the atmosphere than they emit. Destroying them means faster global warming and biodiversity loss that can take many decades to recover. The minerals needed for the technologies meant to save the planet from climate change (solar power and electric vehicle batteries) could speed up ecological collapse in biodiversity hotspots.
To prevent this, developers and governments must immediately integrate these large, offsite environmental impacts into regulatory processes and environmental impact assessments.
Our findings uncovered that mining has a massive ripple effect through space and time. Within one kilometre of a new mine, the local deforestation rate surges by an additional eight percentage points on average compared to unmined landscapes.
More alarming is the distance this damage travels. Elevated forest loss persists up to 20km away from the mining epicentre, and this impact continues for more than a decade after operations begin. This is likely due to both the expansion of the mine itself to follow ore deposits, and the establishment of long term communities around mines.
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Mines bring new roads, infrastructure, agriculture and an influx of workers. Our research found that this development triggers a wave of deforestation that is on average 34 times bigger than the mine itself. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where half the world’s cobalt is found, this multiplier rises as high as 58.
