Mining expansion as new driver of deforestation in Côte d'Ivoire

Mining is a rapidly expanding driver of tropical deforestation, yet the scale of its offsite impacts on deforestation and degradation at biome scale remain poorly quantified, especially across Sub-Saharan Africa. We focus on understanding these national-scale mining impacts in Côte d’Ivoire, which is a global biodiversity hotspot within the Upper Guinean Forests that has lost >80% of its forest cover since 1960. We combine high-resolution land-use maps with a staggered Difference-in-Differences approach, to assess deforestation and degradation dynamics after mine openings in the Côte d’Ivoire tropical moist forest zone between 2001–2020. We identify 446 mining clusters, which together directly caused the loss of 5,631 ha of forest. We estimate that the total effects extended far beyond mine sites, causing an additional 4.8 percentage-point (PP) increase in deforestation within 5 km over 10 years compared to unmined areas. Crucially, for every hectare of deforested land directly cleared for mining, 163 ha were deforested for other, indirect end uses — primarily agricultural and urban expansion linked to mining activity. There was little evidence of significant increases in forest degradation triggered by mining. Our results demonstrate that the true environmental impact of mining vastly exceeds the mine footprint itself and underscores the grave threat that mining poses to moist tropical forests. We recommend the urgent development of national policies and revisions to the mining code to acknowledge the wide area of effect that mining creates, and embedding mitigation to minimise