Mining clears more than the mine — the hidden forest loss around extraction
A Nature study of 16,627 mine clusters in sub-Saharan Africa finds that mining in dense forests caused about 187,000 hectares of direct deforestation from 2001 to 2020, but the larger story is offsite. Compared with unmined areas, deforestation was 8 points higher on a 0-to-100 scale within 1 km of a mine after ten years, and effects persisted out to 20 km. On average, each hectare cleared directly by a mine was associated with 33.9 additional hectares of offsite forest loss within five years. That does not mean the energy transition is bad. It means mineral supply chains have geography, and their forest costs are often larger than the pit.