Amazon Conservation has an extensive history of tracking illegal gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon via our real-time satellite monitoring program, Monitoring of the Andes Amazon Program (MAAP). Over the years, we have continuously expanded our scope across all 9 countries of the Amazon, partnering with numerous local NGOs and civil society organizations who often utilize this information to take legal action against illegal gold mining and other harmful deforestation activities. 

To further support our efforts, Amazon Conservation was recently granted generous funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to improve our real-time monitoring of illegal gold mining across the Amazon basin and advance mechanisms for using this information to improve law enforcement responses. With this grant, we will work directly with local authorities and civil society organizations in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru to improve our collective abilities to quickly detect gold mining and protect key conservation areas and Indigenous territories throughout the Amazon Basin.

Recent MAAP reports reveal that illegal gold mining activities continue to expand in these countries, negatively impacting thousands of acres of pristine forests, contaminating major waterways, and threatening the natural resources that many Indigenous communities depend on. Additionally, illegal mining also leads to large economic losses due to the direct impact on ecosystem services and other sustainable economic activities. Given the recent expansion of these mining activities, it is vital that we step up our efforts to help local authorities and civil society organizations on the ground to strengthen their capacity to mitigate the negative impacts of gold mining on both biodiversity and human health.

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The Gordon and Betty Moore grant will allow us to achieve the following goals by 2026: 

• A comprehensive information platform covering 100% of the Amazon will be established to enable stakeholders to access and utilize advanced detection, mapping, and visualization tools to improve the monitoring and analysis of both legal and illegal gold mining activities.
• Civil society partners will have improved technical skills, strategic capacities, and tools to effectively support government enforcement and policy actions against illegal mining.
• Civil society partners can prompt swift government action to curb and prevent illegal mining in the Amazon, enhancing monitoring and enforcement efforts while also strengthening the policy and legal framework surrounding gold mining.
• Amazon Conservation and its civil society partners lead targeted communication campaigns to share insights, analyses, and outcomes from project interventions. By collaborating with key media outlets and stakeholders, they ensure that this information reaches a wide audience and informs relevant policies.

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Our current civil society partners we will be working with under this grant include: 

                         

Several of our partners recently showcased our partnership to address illegal gold mining in the Amazon at this year’s CBD COP16 in Cali, Colombia. We invite you to watch a recording of the event livestream here. 

We are extremely grateful for the generous support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and look forward to what we can accomplish through our expanding partnership network.

 

Over the past few months, we’ve released a series of MAAP reports (MAAP #215 & MAAP #217) that introduced a critical new dataset (Planet’s Forest Carbon Diligence product) that provides wall-to-wall estimates for aboveground carbon, which has allowed us to highlight the highest (peak) aboveground carbon levels in parts of the Amazon.

Our newest report, MAAP #220, is part 3 of this series, focusing on aboveground carbon loss and gain across the Amazon over the 10 years of the data gathered.

For context, the Amazon loses carbon to the atmosphere due to deforestation, selective logging, human-caused fires, or natural disturbances, while it gains carbon from regeneration and old-growth forests sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. Overall, we find that the Amazon still narrowly functions as an overall carbon sink (meaning the carbon gain is greater than the loss).

However, this gain is quite small relative to the total aboveground carbon contained across the Amazon, reinforcing concerns that the Amazon could flip to a carbon source (with carbon loss becoming greater than its gain) due to increasing deforestation, degradation, and fires.

In this report, we illustrate these findings with a series of novel maps zooming in on emblematic cases of high carbon loss and gain across the Amazon over the past 10 years. These cases include forest loss from agriculture, gold mining, and roads and forest gain from remote primary forests.

Zooming in to the site level yields additional important findings. For example, we can now estimate the carbon loss from major deforestation events across the Amazon during the past ten years. On the flip side, we can also calculate the carbon gain from both secondary and primary forests.

 

Read the full report here.

 

Last month, we were thrilled to share that we’ll be taking part in one of the world’s most critical conservation summits— the CBD COP16 in Cali, Colombia. As global biodiversity faces unprecedented threats, this event offers a vital platform for shaping solutions to help protect ecosystems and species across the planet. 

As we dive into conversations that could redefine the future of conservation, our organization will be hosting an exclusive side event that unveils groundbreaking strategies and solutions implemented to intervene against illegal gold mining: one of the most prominent threats to the Amazon basin. 

As detailed in many of our ongoing MAAP reports, the Amazon is at risk of approaching a dangerous tipping point due to deforestation, converting itself from a lush forest to a savanna ecosystem and becoming a net carbon source. Illegal gold mining activities continue to escalate across this vital rainforest basin, devastating the health of surrounding communities, wildlife habitats, and water resources. Although protected areas cover more than 30% of the Amazon biome, deforestation and degradation continue to threaten the ecological health of millions of acres, and continued gold mining runs counter to an effectively conserved and well-connected network of protected areas in the region. 

Given the drastic environmental and social impacts of illegal gold mining, addressing this threat is essential to reducing the loss of areas with high biodiversity importance and ecological integrity, both of which are widespread in the most biodiverse ecosystem on Earth. 

For this reason, Amazon Conservation will be hosting The Power of Technology and Partnerships to Stop Illegal Gold Mining in the Amazon: a side event that will showcase the solutions devised and implemented by a constellation of civil society organizations working in the region to monitor in real-time the expansion of gold mining, compel governments to intervene against illegal mining, reduce its impacts – including through mercury pollution- and to track the illicit financial flows that fuel its expansion. 

We are eager to share our proposed efforts in combating illegal gold mining across the Amazon, inspiring advocacy and taking action to protect one of the planet’s most vital ecosystems. 

Click here for more details on this event

 

In previous reports (MAAP #182, MAAP #219), evidence has shown that mining activities have increased in the Ecuadorian Amazon, drastically affecting protected areas and Indigenous territories.

Now, our newest report from MAAP,  MAAP #221, provides an in-depth analysis of four protected areas in the Ecuadorian Amazon that are currently threatened by mining activities. Utilizing high-resolution satellite imagery, this report details the impacts of these mining activities in the following areas:

• Podocarpus and Sumaco Napo-Galeras National Parks,
• Cofán Bermejo Ecological Reserve, and
• El Zarza Wildlife Refuge.

The analysis’s findings show that mining deforestation deep within Podocarpus National Park, along the Loyola River, has increased to 50 hectares, representing a growth of 125% between 2023 and 2024.

In other examples, we show how the rapid mining expansion within their buffer zones has recently penetrated the boundaries of the Sumaco Napo-Galeras National Park and the Cofán Bermejo Ecological Reserve.

 

Read the full report here. 

 

 

Our 2023 Impact Report is here! 

2023 was a year full of collaboration and ground-breaking endeavors that have allowed us to push the boundaries of conservation, extending our impact even further and deeper across the Amazon Basin. We are delighted to share our accomplishments with you, our committed community of supporters, and conservationists.

Thanks to the generous support of our donors that fuel our work across the region, we were able to accomplish major milestones in 2023: 

• Halting a massive deforestation project in the Amazon of Suriname by providing local partners with MAAP data that analyzed the impacts of a proposed land deal. This information reached the Surinamese government, and, following the publication of this MAAP report, the government officially announced the termination of this project that would have destroyed over 1 million acres of forests. 
• In coordination with our Peruvian sister organization, we helped establish a legal clinic to provide counsel to local and Indigenous communities fighting illegal deforestation in their forest homes. This support helped them confront nature crimes in their territories, enabling them to submit legal claims and prosecute illicit actors. 
• Through close collaboration with local partners and Indigenous groups, we provided actionable, real-time data that enabled local authorities to conduct 15 major field operations to stop incidents of illegal gold mining, one of them destroying roughly $11 million worth of mining equipment and heavy machinery, making this one of the largest illegal mining raids in Peruvian history. 
• Continued the hard work of protecting 9.3 million acres of wild places, and advanced in the long-term process of creating new protected areas that will protect millions more.

 

We are grateful to have such a dedicated network of supporters, partners, and team members who have helped drive our conservation efforts forward. These incredible achievements would not have been possible without YOU. Here’s to another great year of conservation! 

Click here to read our 2023 Annual Impact Report.