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How a rush for minerals is causing deforestation in tropical regions

An analysis of the extent to which mining caused deforestation between 2001 and 2020 in areas near mines in sub-Saharan Africa could help conservation efforts.
By
  1. Brent Sohngen

    1. Brent Sohngen is in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43221, USA.

For the past century and a half, agricultural expansion has been the main driver of deforestation1. Now, however, factors including slowing population growth, improvements in crop yields and policy innovations such as the growing adoption of community forest management and advances in the detection of illegal logging and land conversion, are helping to lessen the agricultural footprint in tropical forests. Unfortunately, new concerns about deforestation have emerged regarding mineral scarcities, which are underlying commodity price increases that greatly exceed trends in the economy more generally. With these higher prices, the scramble for resources from tropical forests has intensified. So far, policymakers have been mainly in the dark about the effects of mining on deforestation, but writing in Nature, Morton et al.2 present work that resolves many limitations of earlier approaches used to identify and quantify mining-related deforestation effects.

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Nature 654, 874-875 (2026)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01582-w

References

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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