APAMPRAMA, Ghana — Since 2017, the Ghanaian government has aggressively pursued small-scale miners operating in forest reserves across the country, blaming them for the destruction of the country’s forests. But at the same time the government is promoting industrial-scale gold extraction by granting a flurry of mining licenses, many of them overlapping with those same forest reserves. Environmental campaigners are chronicling the toll of both legal and illegal mineral extraction on the country’s woodlands. What they’ve found in the Apamprama reserve, which covers 3,630 hectares (8,970 acres) in the Ashanti region of the country illustrates the threat miners — big and small — pose to forested areas. A third of the Apamprama forest disappeared in little more than 20 years. The moist evergreen forest of Apamprama lies in the catchment of the Oda and Offin rivers, tributaries of the mighty Pra that traverses southern Ghana before entering the Gulf of Guinea. Gold sediments carried by these rivers have over the years attracted miners of all kinds, from local residents eking out a living with basic tools, to big industrial operators. “Illegal mining has been happening in the forest since 2015, but on a very small scale,” Asante Richard, a local representative of Abuakwaa, one of the administrative regions where Apamprama lies, told Mongabay. But, he said, a concession given to the Heritage Imperial Company Limited in 2018 sharply changed the fate of the forest, leading to massive destruction. Satellite data from Global Forest Watch show that forest loss has accelerated…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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