- An artificial intelligence tool trained to track gold mines through satellite imagery found that the deforestation linked to the activity doubled in the Amazon Rainforest from 2018 to 2023.
- Mines are widespread in the biome, affecting especially Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela and Peru.
- The spread of gold mines followed a sharp increase in the price of the metal, which nearly doubled since 2018.
- In Brazil, the federal government has succeeded in reducing the rate at which illegal mining is expanding inside Indigenous territories, but still struggles to block its spread outright.
In 2021, scientists and journalists got together to train an artificial intelligence model on how to detect gold mines in the Amazon. One year later, they launched Amazon Mining Watch, a tool capable of using satellite imagery to identify the scars left by miners in the rainforest. Designed by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network, the NGO Amazon Conservation, and Earth Genome, one of the main challenges of the initiative was the inevitable cloud obscuring images of the rainforest.
“[Cloud cover] means that it’s hard to get clear views of what’s happening on the ground,” Edward Boyda, from Earth Genome, told Mongabay. “We look across the whole set of those images, 50 or so per year, and from those we collect the cloud-free ones.”
The endeavor was a success, but the picture they gained isn’t good. According to the methodology, the area occupied by gold mines across the entire Amazon doubled from 2018 to 2023, going from 963,000 to 1.9 million hectares (2.4 million to 4.7 million acres).
Researchers from the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) analyzed the data and concluded that most of the mines are located in Brazil (55%) — not surprising since the country accounts for 60% of the entire biome. However, the activity is pervasive in other countries, like Guyana, which accounted for 15% of the total mining areas, Suriname (12%), Venezuela (7%) and Peru (7%).
“It’s absolutely widespread,” Boyda said, adding he was startled by the pace of the destruction. “Mining is expanding in many different places, and many new areas are being opened all the time.”
The spread of gold mines followed a sharp increase in the price of the metal, which jumped from $1,300 per ounce in 2018 to $2,300/oz in 2023. In recent months, it has reached up to $2,461.
Experts state that despite being responsible for the clearance of much smaller areas of rainforest compared to land grabbing and agribusiness, gold mining can have more harmful impacts.
“In contrast with agribusiness, much of the mining happens in intact rainforest,” Boyda said, adding that gold mining is usually the first in a series of predatory activities. “When miners go into these places, they create pathways and airstrips, so there’s a real concern that this primary activity leads down the road to much more widespread deforestation for agriculture and other land uses.”
Moreover, gold mining usually happens on riverbanks, and the destruction of entire layers of soil makes it almost impossible for the forest to regenerate on its own. Miners also use mercury to separate the gold from the ore, contaminating the water consumed by Indigenous and riverine communities. In Brazil, most mercury is illegally obtained.
“You’re left with a kind of a moonscape. You have toxic sludge pools where there was healthy rainforest before,” Boyda said. “The local environmental impacts of this are particularly dire.”
Brazil’s Indigenous lands still under pressure
One of the most emblematic cases of the spread of gold mining in the Amazon, according to the MAAP report, is the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, located in the border region of Brazil’s Amazonas and Roraima states. Artificial intelligence tracked a total of 19,000 hectares (47,000 acres) cleared for gold mines in this territory, which, under the country’s Constitution, is supposed to be off-limits to mining. More than 90% of this deforestation occurred in the past five years.
That boom began with the administration of Jair Bolsonaro, an unapologetically pro-mining president who was in office from the start of 2019 until the end of 2022. The illegal mining in the Yanomami territory reached a crisis point where the number of invading miners almost equaled the 30,000 Indigenous inhabitants.
The illegal activity spawned a humanitarian crisis, with Indigenous children dying from malnutrition and malaria. This generated international headlines in 2023, and prompted the new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to create a task force to expel the invaders.
Despite the government’s efforts, however, illegal mining has continued to advance in the territory, albeit at a slower rate, thanks to the support of criminal organizations. In the six first months of 2024, about 170 hectares (419 acres) of forest in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory were cleared for gold mines, down nearly 6% compared to the previous year.
The numbers come from a Greenpeace report published in mid-July, which concluded that the illegal miners are migrating from the north to the south of the vast territory, which covers an area nearly the size of South Korea. “The satellite images clearly show that the illegal miners, trying to evade inspection, are heading for the southern part of the territory, closer to the Amazonas state,” the organization said in the report.
Greenpeace also looked at the Kayapó and Munduruku Indigenous lands. Together, these three territories accounted for 90% of all illegal mining inside Brazilian Indigenous lands by the end of 2023. “These are some of the areas most affected by illegal mining,” Jorge Dantas, Greenpeace Brasil spokesperson, told Mongabay. “So we understand that if the government manages to provide a consistent response to mining in these regions, it can replicate this success elsewhere.”
The report concluded that miners destroyed 417 hectares (1,030 acres) of forest in these three territories in the first half of 2024. The Kayapó Indigenous Territory, in Pará state, has also been the scene of police raids, which have contributed to deforestation rates linked to gold mining dropping by 60% from the previous year. Even so, 227 hectares (561 acres) of the territory have been cleared for mining this year.
“You have fewer openings, but it’s noteworthy that the miners continue to operate,” Dantas said. “There’s been an increase in operations, but the illegal miners are still able to sophisticate their methods and continue to open up new areas.”
Banner image: A research expedition in September 2019 to Madre de Dios in the Peruvian Amazon observed the extent of river damage due to gold mining. Image courtesy of Jason Houston/CINCIA.
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