As the price of gold booms, so does the roar of excavators and scream of chainsaws in some of the world’s most ecologically sensitive forests.

Between 2001 and 2019, gold drove more deforestation than any other mineral, from the dense tropical forests of the Amazon and Africa’s western coast, to the boreal forests of Russia, and down through Myanmar and Indonesia.

But with prices having spiked more than 120% in the last five years, fuelled by geopolitical instability and disruptions to international trade, campaigners fear the gold rush has only accelerated, with huge implications for the world’s forests.

“The rapid rise in the price of gold creates a powerful economic incentive for mining expansion,” explains Andres Santana, senior manager for combating illegal deforestation at Amazon Conservation, in an“Higher prices increase the potential returns from extracting gold, including from remote and environmentally sensitive areas, adding further pressure to forests and local communities.”Criminal gangs have moved in as gold’s price has risen, funding illegal mining and taking advantage of gold’s mercurial properties; it’s ability to be re-smelted creates a shape-shifting currency that is hard to trace, and easy to launder.

As Reuters has reported, gold smuggling out of Africa has surged over the past decade, finding its way onto international markets through regional hubs in Mali, and less regulated markets in Dubai, Istanbul and Mumbai. It’s these loopholes that campaigners want the industry to close.

Hannah Mowat, campaigns coordinator at the environmental NGO Fern, says in an email that in many countries “small-scale illicit mining is largely controlled by big players, who operate with foreign money and have top political connections. These are not artisanal miners panning for gold – these are highly mechanised, highly financialised and connected actors.”Not only does this illicit mining cause deforestation, but the use of mercury and cyanide poisons water supplies and food chains, leading to severe health consequences for communities living downstream of mining sites.

On a recent visit to Ghana, Jonathan Byers, a consultant and geospatial analyst at the environmental NGO Mighty Earth saw entire river valleys where the water flowed milky brown due to pollution from gold mining. “They can’t even put (it) on the cocoa trees anymore because it kills them,” he explains. “It is the human impacts of this that are pretty catastrophic.”While industrial gold mining has been linked with harm to communities through deforestation and pollution, major international mining companies must comply with strict rules to be members of organisations such as the World Gold Council (WGC), whose Responsible Gold Mining Principles sets a framework for the gold supply chain, including investors and consumers.

Another initiative is the Gold Bar Integrity (GBI) programme, run jointly by the WGC and the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA). It uses blockchain technology to digitally trace gold as it moves through global supply chains, with refineries having to report the country of origin for every gram of gold they take in, explains Neil Harby, LBMA's chief technical officer. Applying the so-called alchemy test, he says, “means a refinery cannot … produce more gold bars than the gold it sourced”.

Around 90% of industrially mined gold (sanctions mean Russia is excluded) are covered by the GBI, but the standard only takes in a small fraction of gold from artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM), even though this accounts for as much as 20% of global production. While not all ASGM gold is illegal, “this is where the deforestation is happening,” says Harby.

The rising price of gold has also increased the demand for scrap and recycled gold, says Harby, which now makes up as much as 50% of the gold market. The link between recycled and ASGM gold is strong, he says. “It (ASGM gold) gets passed as recycled gold; it loses its identity, what we call ‘gold-washing’.”

Chemically finger-printing the gold can help. “Gold from certain countries has certain signatures,” says Harby, “but, as this gold is re-smelted time and time again, it becomes increasingly difficult to track these trace elements.”Ghana is suffering more than most from illicit mining, and is now one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. In 2022, the then government passed legislation opening up nearly 90% of the country’s 9 million hectares of forest reserves to mining. One study found a 5.9% decline in forest cover in one reserve, which had experienced a 19-fold increase in mining, and a complete absence of vegetation in areas that were heavily mine.

This led to the creation of the Ghana Coalition Against Galamsey, explains Daryl Bosu, deputy director at the conservation NGO A Roche Ghana. Galamsey roughly translates as “gather and sell”, he says, when historically people could pick gold nuggets from riverbeds or fields after heavy rainfall.

In 2025 a new government repealed the law but Bosu says the reality on the ground is unchanged. “Our forests reserves are still under rampage and destruction by illegal miners.”Last year the Ghanian government set up the Gold Board (Goldbod) to clamp down on criminal gangs who were smuggling gold out of Ghana.

But the system doesn’t address traceability, says Bosu. He has no doubt that gold linked to deforestation in Ghana continues to reach London markets (which account for 70% of global trade).

He wants a zero-tolerance approach towards miners and politicians involved in illegal mining, and in this respect can see a glimmer of hope. In July, politician and businessman politician Bernard Antwi Boasiako was jailed for 20 years for involvement in illegal mining. At the same time, Ghana and the WGC signed an agreement to accelerate the formalisation of the country’s ASGM sector, with a mixture of investment and training.

Another area on the frontline of expanding gold mining is the Amazon. According to March’s inaugural report of the Amazon Mining Watch Panorama, in the last quarter of 2025 there was an estimated 6,000 ha of new mining-related deforestation (MRD) across the Amazon Basin, much of it put down to the quest for gold.

Amazon Mining Watch is a platform led by Amazon Conservation, Earth Genome and the Pulitzer Center.

The report used AI to analyse mining scars across all nine Amazonian countries, and showed that as well as new incursions in areas such as Territorio Charip in Ecuador, there was a resurgence of activity in the Igarapes do Juruena State Park in Brazil, where MRD rose by 660% between August 2025 and April 2026.

A further 200 ha of MRD were detected in Peru’s Tambopata National Reserve, which had seen levels of forest destruction drop after a major government operation.

“Criminal organisations can exploit weak… gold traceability systems and gaps in due diligence requirements to introduce illegally extracted gold into legal supply chains,” says Amazon Conservation’s Santana, “taking advantage of the Amazon’s vast geography, institutional weaknesses and limited regional coordination.”Amazon Conservation has also launched the Amazon Mining Policy Scoreboard, which evaluates and compares the legal and policy frameworks governing gold mining across the Amazon.

It shows that many countries have strong legal frameworks on paper, but implementation lags, with governments failing to address the underlying drivers of illegal mining, as well as providing alternative livelihoods for communities.

Victoire Girard, a professor at the Nova School of Business and Economics at the New University of Lisbon, says illegal mining provides a livelihood for millions of people, which means a simple ban on illicit gold mining won’t work.

“People are attracted to gold mining because they can’t do anything else,” she explains. “If there’s a drought and cultivators lose everything, they’re going to turn to gold as an alternative livelihood.”There’s already a growing trend in Ghana for farmers to grub up their uneconomic cocoa plantations and mine the land instead, she says. To keep the farmers working the land rather than mining it, she believes, companies and governments need to look at issues such as crop insurance and affordable loans.

Mowat of FERN agrees there will always be some form of mining, and that communities “must get increased income and wealth from the gold that they are digging out”. This includes having a greater say in the allocation of mining permits, more community benefits and better training of artisanal miners.

The WGC also recognises the problem. The council’s global head of public policy, Andrew Naylor, said in an email that while governments have the primary responsibility to enforce laws and improve governance industry and civil society can help by building formal pathways for legitimate ASGM gold to enter the market.

“Enforcement is necessary to disrupt criminal networks, but formalisation is what helps prevent them from returning,” he adds.

Mowat acknowledges the work that organisations such as the WGC are doing, but points out that its rules are voluntary, and there’s no external scrutiny.

In December, London hosts the Illicit Finance Summit, when FERN and other civil society organisations will present a roadmap to address illegal mining’s root causes. Alongside tackling the systemic poverty driving small-scale miners into illicit supply chains, it will also encourage financial centres to do more to ensure that illegal gold can’t be co-mingled with legitimate gold and enter the international financial system.

“Unless there is a clear, international standard for responsible gold, that requires market players to know where the gold they are dealing with comes from, then western markets will continue to drive illicit gold mining, and fuel global insecurity, human rights abuses and environmental harm,” Mowat adds.

This article is from the latest issue of The Ethical Corporation magazine, on deforestation risk. You can download the digital pdf of the magazine by clicking here