It may look like a new way to create wealth for African countries but, unfortunately, the surging demand for green energy transition minerals like copper and cobalt – essential for electric vehicles and renewables, will rather create massive deforestation in countries endowed with these minerals. This is because for every hectare (10,000 square metres) of active mine exploited, an additional 34 hectares of forest is lost to supporting infrastructure like roads, housing and agriculture, as a new University of Sheffield-led study has shown.
The authors of the study said, between 2001 and 2020, a total of 187,000 hectares of forest was converted to mines in Africa – an area roughly equivalent to the state of Mauritius, and this is leading to massive deforestation, consequently, with demand expected to grow 40-fold by 2040, there is danger ahead.
They warned that current environmental assessments drastically underestimate mining’s true footprint, calling for ‘zero-deforestation’ supply chains to protect vital forests from being sacrificed.
In the study, “Mining triggers extensive additional deforestation in sub-Saharan Africa”, published in the Nature journal, the authors said, “for every hectare of direct deforestation due to the mine footprint, mining triggers, on average, 34 hectares of additional offsite loss within five years through ancillary activities, including agriculture and settlements.”
The authors said mines extracting cobalt and copper — key energy transition minerals — caused the highest amount of additional deforestation. The “embedding offsite deforestation levels into environmental impact assessments for new mining projects will be key to ensuring zero-deforestation or no-net-loss supply chains for critical minerals and reduce future mining-driven forest losses in sub-Saharan Africa”, they added.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) seems to agree with the findings in a statement early this year, which expressed concerns with the surging global demand for transitional minerals — such as cobalt, lithium, and copper.
The UNEP said the trend will replicate historical boom-bust cycles across Africa, and said “this threatens local ecosystems, exacerbates inequality, and risks locking host nations into low-value, environmentally degrading extraction rather than sustainable development”.
Its key concerns and strategic focus areas across Africa include ecosystem destruction and Pollution. Unregulated and extractive mining, they also said, threatens vulnerable biomes, leading to severe biodiversity loss, deforestation, and the contamination of vital local water sources with toxic chemical runoff.
Mining operations, the UNEP said, frequently violate indigenous land rights and displace local populations without fair compensation or proper Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). In addition, the rapid influx of large-scale and informal mining operations increases the risk of labour exploitation, poor workplace safety, and threats directed at environmental and human rights defenders.
The UNEP said host countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, which accounts for a vast majority of global cobalt production, are at risk of capturing very little economic value from the extraction process if value-added processing and manufacturing are not localised.
The authors of the study said the conversion of currency into gold during global periods of financial upheaval has increased gold exploitation, and the global shift towards renewable energy has further heightened demand for key energy transition minerals (ETMs), including cobalt, lithium and copper.
They used continent-wide data on post-deforestation land uses and a robust difference-in-differences framework to assess 16,627 mines between 2001 and 2020, and said globally, mining directly threatens 8% of vertebrate species and drives widespread habitat loss.
“This is concerning, given that more than 20% of the remaining intact tropical forest lies in mineral, gas or oil concessions, many of which are still in the exploration stage. Mine expansion affects forests directly when land is cleared for mining pits or shafts, on-site processing, spoil heaps, or tailing storage facilities,” the authors said.
They said more than 325,000 hectares (ha) of tropical forest was lost directly to industrial mining between 2000 and 2019. However, focusing solely on mine footprints ignores ancillary off-site anthropogenic activities triggered by mining indirectly, including the construction of ports, roads and railways, settlements and agricultural expansion.
“Each of these activities drives further deforestation and increases forest accessibility, facilitating hunting and trapping. National-scale attempts to estimate total offsite deforestation caused by mining vary substantially from no-detectable-net impact in Zambia and Madagascar, to significant net-negative impacts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Brazil,” the study said.
According to the authors, across sub-Saharan Africa, mining caused an overall mean increase in deforestation of within 1 km of a mine after ten years compared to unmined areas). At 1–5 km from a mine, the region-wide average effect was smaller, but remained substantial, with an increase in cumulative deforestation after ten years. The greatest impacts in each concentric buffer predominantly occurred in the years immediately after the mine was established and cumulative impacts plateaued after five years in some countries.
The study said mining had the greatest effect on total additional deforestation near mining sites in the years immediately after establishment, adding that total additional deforestation was correlated with mine size: the largest mines had the greatest additional forest losses. The amount of additional deforestation within 1 km of a mine ten years after operations started, increased in most of the countries.
The authors said their work provides comprehensive estimates of mining-induced deforestation of dense forest across sub-Saharan Africa, identifying 187,070 hectares of direct mining-induced deforestation — for instance, from pits, tailing ponds and spoil heaps — between 2001 and 2020.
They said increased deforestation effects persist up to 20 km from mines. This represents a 34-fold increase in additional deforestation relative to on-site loss, through ancillary activities such as agriculture, urban expansion and road construction. Effectively managing and minimizing additional mining-associated deforestation is therefore critical to maintaining the globally vital carbon stocks and biodiversity of sub-Saharan Africa.
From the study, the researchers found that previous work that quantifies mining-driven deforestation at the regional scale has predominantly focused on quantifying the losses driven by the direct mining footprint. Finer-scale studies focusing on offsite mining impacts have found additional deforestation up to 5 km from 255 artisanal mines in the eastern DRC, up to 10 km from 446 mine clusters in the southern Côte d’Ivoire 36 and up to 70 km from 50 large industrial mines in the Brazilian Amazon.
“The substantially larger area of impact in the Brazilian Amazon, relative to this study and prior estimates across the African continent, is likely a product of the larger mine size and the creation of considerable extra road and rail infrastructure to link large mines and ports,” they added.
The study said economic development and the global energy transition will continue to drive a boom in mining activities across Africa, with demand for key ETMs sourced predominantly from Africa expected to grow by up to 40-fold by 2040. Although this represents an important opportunity for socio-economic development in many African countries that rely on artisanal and industrial mining as a key element of their economy, their study underscores the severe risks to the continent’s remaining forest habitats under ‘business-as-usual’ mining practices.
“Future environmental impact projections for cobalt mining — the DRC alone accounted for 80% of global cobalt production in 2024 — suggest that these impacts will only continue to grow and their reduction is linked tightly to the success of mineral recycling initiatives,” they said.
Giving another perspective, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRC) which said it had been monitoring human rights risks linked to the mining of minerals essential for powering the global energy transition, noted that, between 2010 and 2024, the Transition Minerals Tracker (TMT) recorded 835 allegations of human rights and environmental abuse linked to the extraction of these key minerals. Updated annually, this year’s analysis spotlights the human rights implications of mining eight transition minerals: bauxite, cobalt, copper, iron ore, lithium, manganese, nickel and zinc.
The BHRC said while all minerals covered by the TMT can be found in Africa, the continent is particularly rich in cobalt, copper, lithium and manganese. The DRC accounts for more than 70 percent of the global cobalt supply, while Zambia is ranked seventh globally in copper production (used across a wide range of technologies and in power grids for electrification) and second only to DRC in Africa. Zimbabwe is the top producer of lithium in Africa and among the top five globally. South Africa is the world’s largest producer of manganese.
Analysis of the 2025 TMT reveals that those most impacted by extraction of transitional minerals are workers, Indigenous Peoples, local communities and human rights defenders (HRDs). In Africa, workers and local communities are bearing the brunt of human rights abuses related to the extraction of transition minerals. Communities where mining takes place are still steeped in poverty – despite the mining companies reaping high profits from exploiting their land. The TMT also recorded instances of lack of meaningful engagement and violation of workers’ rights. Meanwhile, a violent conflict in the DRC – attributed to the control of minerals, including transition minerals – has exacerbated the plight of workers and local communities.
To mitigate these risks, the UNEP has partnered with groups like the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA) to promote strict social and environmental audits at mine sites. Furthermore, the UN advocates for integrating the extractive sector with global sustainability standards and aligning operations with the African Green Minerals Strategy.
Since 1970, the IRMA study said, extraction of metal ores has quadrupled, fuelling rapid economic growth. The total, or embodied volume of material stock used in buildings, infrastructure and machinery, increased 23-fold between 1990 and 2010.
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Francis Koktuse is a free-lance journalist based in Accra. Currently, he is the local Stringer for the New York Times. He also writes for University World News, as well as Science and Development.Net. He was a Staff Writer for the African Concord, and Africa Economic Digest in London, UK.
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