Africa’s critical minerals mining boom could wipe out more than one-third of the continent’s ape population, with short-term offset plans failing to compensate for negative impacts, researchers have found.

The rising demand for materials key to the large-scale transition to cleaner energy, such as copper, lithium, nickel, and cobalt, is driving a surge of mining in Africa, where a large share of those minerals is still unexploited.

A study published in the journal Science Advances and led by researchers from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), and the US-based non-profit conservation organisation Rewild, found that impacts on biodiversity and wildlife could be much higher than estimated due to data scarcity.

Mining currently ranks only fourth in the frequency of reported threats across African ape sites documented in the Ape Populations, Environments, and Surveys (A.P.E.S.), and the IUCN Red List recently estimated that only 2-13% of all primate species were threatened by mining, road and rail construction, and oil and gas drilling.

However, according to the study, the true impact of mining on biodiversity and, in particular, on great apes – nearly 180,000 gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees – has so far been considerably underestimated, as mining companies are not required to make biodiversity data publicly available.

“Given recent findings on the density of mining areas across Africa, these values might be a considerable underestimation of the real threat of mining to apes. This discrepancy may be due to the lack of data from mining locations,” the study said.

“For 97% of mining areas, no ape survey data are available, underscoring the importance of increased accessibility to environmental data within the mining sector to facilitate research into the complex interactions between mining, climate, biodiversity, and sustainability.”

Furthermore, available data do not accurately reflect the original state of the ape populations in the area before mining operations started, as companies collected them after many years of exploration and habitat destruction, Genevieve Campbell, senior researcher at Rewild and among the authors of the study, explained.

“Avoidance needs to take place already during the exploration phase, but unfortunately, this phase is poorly regulated,” she noted.

“A shift away from fossil fuels is good for the climate but must be done in a way that does not jeopardise biodiversity,” said first author Jessica Junker, researcher at Rewild and former postdoctoral researcher at iDiv and MLU.

“Companies, lenders, and nations need to recognise that it may sometimes be of greater value to leave some regions untouched to mitigate climate change and help prevent future epidemics.”

OFFSETTING ISSUE

As areas where mining projects are developed often overlap with preserved areas where apes and other threatened wildlife species live, researchers stressed that a substantial step up in efforts to integrate conservation goals with economic development targets is required.

“By integrating a global mining dataset with great ape density distribution, we estimated the number of African great apes that spatially coincided with industrial mining projects,” researchers said.

However, mining companies frequently fail to consider all the impacts they have on biodiversity, whether direct or indirect.

“To compensate for any residual impact that could not be avoided, reduced, or restored, mining companies can implement compensation measures by creating biodiversity offsets to ensure that an equal or greater area of identical habitat or ape population is protected or improved.”

Notably, researchers stressed that offset remains a controversial practice, and its effectiveness for apes has yet to be demonstrated.

“Mining companies need to focus on avoiding their impacts on great apes as much as possible and use offsetting as a last resort as there is currently no example of a great ape offset that has been successful,” Campbell said.

By Giada Ferraglioni – giada@carbon-pulse.com

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