Causes and Consequences of a Tropical Forest Gold Rush in the Guiana Shield, South America

Abstract

Statistical and spatial analyses of both historical time series and remotely sensed data show a link between the spatial distribution and growth of gold production across the Guiana Shield in northeast Amazonia. Results indicate that an exponential rise in production across an expanding area is primarily a delayed response to the 1971-1978 market flotation of international gold prices. The subsequent 10-fold (2-fold) average nominal (real) price increase has provided a compelling economic incentive to mass exploitation of lower-grade gold deposits. The ground-based and remotely sensed distributions of mining activity are strongly attached to these deposits that dominate the region's gold geology. The presence of these gold-bearing formations in conservation and sustainable timber zones has sparked social conflict and environmental degradation across the region. Left unmanaged, more than a quarter-million square-kilometer area of tropical forest zoned for protection and sustainable management could ultimately be compromised by the price-driven boom in gold mining through poorly integrated resource use planning, lack of reclamation effort, and control of illegal operations. Serious public health issues propagated through the unregulated mining environment further erode the financial benefits achieved through gold extraction. This study demonstrates in part how international economic policies successfully stabilizing more conspicuous centers of the global economy can have unintended but profound environmental and social impacts on remote commodity frontiers.

Our common future? Cross-scalar scenario analysis for social–ecological sustainability of the Guiana Shield, South America

“…Hammond et al, 2007;Maughan 2011), as is the rising and sustained threat of organised crime and/or corrupt groups in co-opting whole regions and communities in supporting the narcotics drugs trade, migration, ill-planned infrastructure projects, and the unregulated expansion of the agricultural frontier (e.g. Ledec and Quintero, 2003;Dávalos et al, 2011).…”

“…FPP, 2007FPP, , 2013Hammond et al, 2007). This suggests major conflicts between conservation and large-scale resource extraction in the future.…”

Rights to the forest, REDD+ and elections: Mining in Guyana

“…The broad characteristics of Guyana's mining industry are highlighted by Clifford, (2011), highlighting the similarities and differences with comparable industries across the world. Regionally there have been just two quantitative assessments of mining activity, a small-scale time series analysis of the mining behaviour of the Ndyuka people of Suriname (Heemskerk 2001) and a quantitative analysis of mining in the Guiana Shield as a whole (Hammond, Gond, de Thoisy, Forget, & DeDijn, 2007). This paper extends the literature relating to expropriation and property rights, the impact of REDD+ policy on property rights to the forest, the driving forces behind small-scale mining and the interactions between political institutions and resource extraction.…”

Advances in the study of giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis): ecology, behavior, and conservation: a review

“…Studies have shown that poorly managed mining can create significant impacts through deforestation, cultural erosion and social conflict in rural communities that often capture only a nominal share of financial benefit but bear the weight of environmental and social costs (Hammond et al, 2007).…”

“…Consequences such as the contamination of aquatic ecosystems and its implications for wildlife and humans are likely to become more significant in the future due to the price-driven boom in gold mining. Over 25 years, for instance, the Guiana Shield region has seen exponential growth in gold extraction, with a 60-fold increasing in annual gold output (Hammond et al, 2007).…”