Peru's Gold Mining Causing Alarming Deforestation: Report

A report has warned that the continued issue of gold mining in Peru's Amazon poses a serious threat to biodiversity, water quality, forest carbon stocks and human health.

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Published by the Carnegie Institution for Science, the study showed that one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, the Madre de Dios region has been torn apart by mining corporations, despite government decrees and police enforcement.

A haven for a wide variety of species, Madre de Dios' abundant forestation has slowly been chipped away, slowly deteriorating the region’s natural resources.

“Gold mining to me is the most extreme assault you can make on the Tambopata Reserve and its buffer zone,” Greg Asner, an ecologist at the Stanford Institute, said in an interview. “It’s a blunt assault on nature in that reserve.”

According to their research, the scientists discovered that by 2012 the mining zone in Madre de Dios had grown four times from its size in 1999.

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“It’s just seething with species,” he said of Madre de Dios. “It’s a place where I’ve seen jaguars swimming across rivers and huge amounts of fauna.” The scientist added that the mercury used in the mining process has more than likely polluted the river system.

Researchers from the institute estimate that mining from 1999 to 2016 has destroyed approximately 11,000 acres of forest per year.

The gradual increase in the rate of deforestation due to gold-mining since 1999 experienced a brief respite in 2012 when government intervention was at its highest, only to nearly double the following year.

“All of the detection we’re doing does not resolve the really big additional effect of hydrological pollution from the sediments and from the mercury that’s used in the mining process,” Asner said.