Mining triggers extensive additional deforestation across sub-Saharan Africa

Demand for minerals sourced from sub-Saharan Africa is expanding rapidly, driven partly by the global shift towards renewable energy heightening demand for key energy transition minerals such as cobalt and copper. Combining a dataset of post-deforestation land-use across sub-Saharan Africa with verified data on the commodities extracted by specific mines, we assessed the spatiotemporal footprint of mining-driven deforestation on the continent across the last 20 years. We find 187,000 hectares of direct mining-driven deforestation across 16,627 mines between 2001 and 2020, and that the annual forest area directly lost to mining is increasing in >70% of countries. Leveraging recent methodological advances, we apply a quasi-experimental design and heterogeneity robust difference-in-differences models to specifically ask how much additional off-site deforestation is triggered by mine establishment. At the continental scale, we find mining triggers an 8.0 percentage point increase in deforestation within 1 km of a mine versus unmined areas, with elevated deforestation (+1.1pp) persisting up to 20 km from mines even after 10 years. At the national level, we detected increased levels of deforestation up to 5 km from mining sites for the majority of countries after 10 years. For every hectare of direct deforestation due to the mine footprint, mining triggers, on average, 34 hectares of additional offsite loss through ancillary activities (e.g. agriculture or settlements). This varied nationally, rising to 58 additional hectares per single hectare of mining footprint in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mines extracting cobalt and copper, both key energy transition minerals, caused the highest additional total deforestation across the continent. Iron, gold and silver mines had the largest area of effect, driving increased deforestation up to 10 km from mining sites. Embedding robust environmental impact assessments in national policy to track off-site leakage is essential to reducing future forest losses in sub-Saharan Africa and transitioning towards transparent zero-deforestation supply chains.