Africa’s forests are gradually disappearing due to mine development, a new study suggests.
Nearly 190,000 hectares of forest were converted to mines in Africa between 2001 and 2020, according to researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Sheffield. While that area — roughly the size of Comoros — is only a fraction of the size of the continent, the study found that every hectare deforested within a mine’s immediate footprint led to an additional 34 hectares of forest loss, usually to create roads or new urban settlements to service the mine.
In DR Congo, which holds more than half of the world’s cobalt, used for lithium batteries in electric vehicles, this multiplier jumps as high as 58 hectares of deforestation for every hectare lost to a mine.
“Healthy forests are carbon sinks,” the researchers wrote in The Conversation. “The minerals needed for the technologies meant to save the planet from climate change ... could speed up ecological collapse in biodiversity hotspots.”
