Mining in indigenous lands in the Legal Amazon has increased by 1,217% in the last 35 years, jumping from 7.45 square kilometers (km2) occupied by this activity in 1985 to 102.16 km2 in 2020.
Almost all (95%) of these mining areas Illegal mining is concentrated in three indigenous lands: Kayapó, followed by Munduruku and Yanomami.
The data are from a study carried out by researchers from the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) and the University of South Alabama, in the United States. The results of the work were published in the journal Remote Sensing.
“We observed a constant growth of mining in indigenous lands between 1985 and 2020, which worsened from 2017. In that year, illegal mining occupied 35 km2 in indigenous lands and, in 2020, jumped to almost 103 km2”, he tells the Agency Fapesp Guilherme Augusto Verola Mataveli, postdoctoral fellow at Inpe's Earth Observation and Geoinformatics Division, FAPESP scholar and first author of the study.
Other authors of the article are Michel Eustáquio Dantas Chaves, also a researcher at INPE, and Elton Vicente Escobar Silva, a doctoral candidate at the institution.
In order to identify mining areas in indigenous lands, the researchers used a dataset referring to the period from 1985 to 2020 provided by the MapBiomas project – a collaborative network formed by non-governmental organizations, universities and technology startups that maps the coverage and land use in Brazil.
The initiative classifies the type of land use and land cover throughout Brazil through automatic analysis, carried out by algorithms, of images obtained by satellites, with a spatial resolution of 30 meters.
“Based on the automatic classification of the images, the system is capable of distinguishing a forest area from another with consolidated mining, which has exposed soil and very different characteristics of the vegetation cover”, explains Mataveli.
One of the limitations of the system for identifying mining in indigenous lands, however, is the impossibility of classifying mining in vessels anchored in rivers or in small areas where forest conversion for this activity has not occurred.
“This alarming number of the advance of mining in indigenous lands in the Legal Amazon that we surveyed is probably even greater if we take into account these limitations of the data set used”, says Mataveli.
NEW GARIMPO FRONTIER
According to data from the study, the majority of illegal mining within indigenous lands in the Legal Amazon is related to gold mining (99.5%) and only 0.5% to tin mining.
This activity is more intense in the Kayapó indigenous land, where the estimated occupation of the area by prospectors in 2020 – 77.1 km2 – was almost 1,000% higher than that found in 1985, of 7.2 km2.
In the Munduruku indigenous land, mining activity has shown strong growth since 2016, jumping from 4.6 km2 to 15.6 km2 in just five years. The same pattern was found in the Yanomami indigenous land, where illegal mining occupied 0.1 km2 in 2016 and increased to 4.2 km2 in 2020.
“It is in these three indigenous lands that the government must, in fact, act, through the intensification of inspection actions, to prevent the advance of illegal mining”, evaluates Mataveli.
According to the researcher, the Yanomami indigenous land, demarcated in 1992, is the most isolated of the three. This isolation made access for illegal miners difficult for a long time. The increase in the price of gold in the international market and the weakening of the protection of the Legal Amazon in recent years, however, stimulated investments in infrastructure for access to this protected area.
“This combination of factors culminated in the transformation of the Yanomami indigenous land into a new mining frontier”, says Mataveli.
According to data from the study, in 2018, mining exceeded, for the first time, 2 km2 in the Yanomami indigenous land. Since then, the exponential increase of this illegality has resulted in a scenario of invasions and human rights violations.
In 2022, the Federal Police identified a 505% increase in mining on the banks of the Uraricoera River. The Yanomami leaders estimate the presence of more than 20,000 illegal prospectors within the indigenous territory, while the total number of indigenous people is around 30,000. In addition, the presence of miners has increased cases of malaria and spread other infectious diseases to indigenous peoples.
“The tragedy we are seeing today, with the humanitarian crisis of the Yanomami, was already foreseeable”, says Mataveli.
In order to reverse this scenario, it is first necessary to identify and monitor the indigenous lands where illegal mining has increased most significantly in recent years. In addition, it is necessary to curb deforestation.
Normally, mining in the Legal Amazon, including on indigenous lands, occurs after deforestation, says Mataveli.
“Illegal mining in the Amazon is closely linked to deforestation, because you have to clear the forest before exploiting the soil,” he says.
The article Mining is a growing threat within indigenous lands of the Brazilian Amazon can be accessed here.
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