BANGKOK — A new satellite analysis from U.S. think tank the Stimson Center has identified 517 suspected mines along rivers in Laos, including major tributaries of the Mekong, Southeast Asia’s longest river, heightening concerns about contamination of waterways that sustain local communities.

Stimson has not ground-truthed the mine sites identified through satellite imagery, but Mongabay spoke by phone with several government officials in Laos’s southern border province of Attapeu, home to 188 mines in the data, who said illegal mining remains widespread despite recent crackdowns.

“We still see officials carrying out inspections and confiscating equipment” from illegal mines in Attapeu, said one government official who spoke to Mongabay on condition of anonymity due to the limited press freedoms in Laos.

The analysis shines new light on the scale of mining in river basins across mainland Southeast Asia. The issue previously caught the spotlight in northern Thailand earlier this year after dangerous levels of arsenic were found to be flowing downstream from unregulated gold mines in Myanmar’s Shan state.

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Dec. 3 (UPI) — Unregulated mining across the Mekong region is accelerating at a pace that environmental researchers warn is outstripping governance, enforcement and ecological safeguards.

From Myanmar’s jade-rich northern highlands to informal gold pits along Laos and Cambodia’s riverbanks, mineral extraction is expanding in some of Southeast Asia’s most fragile ecosystems, often beyond the reach of national law and outside public scrutiny.

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Satellite data show at least 27 new rare earth mines have opened across Laos since 2022, mostly in protected areas and many within the Mekong River Basin, raising transboundary pollution risks for Vietnam and the wider Mekong system.

New data show a recent proliferation of rare earth mines across river basins in Laos, potentially posing a transboundary water pollution threat to Vietnam and the entire Mekong River system. The new findings suggest that Chinese demand for rare earth minerals has led to the industry’s expansion into Laos, even though rare earth mineral extraction is currently illegal there.

Research from U.S.-based think tank the Stimson Center has identified 27 rare earth mines that have opened across river basins in Laos since 2022, including seven identified via satellite imagery analysis as having opened this year. Twenty-three of these mines appear to be in protected areas, but it’s unclear whether or not they’re operating with permission from officials.

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MONDULKIRI – Two trailblazing female graduates from the Institute of Technology of Cambodia (ITC) are breaking barriers in the gold mining industry.  They’re tackling key roles as a surveyor and a metallurgist at Renaissance Minerals (Cambodia) Ltd in Mondulkiri province, overcoming challenges related to gender and demanding work schedules.

Renaissance Minerals, a subsidiary of Australia’s Emerald Resources NL, employs nearly 700 Cambodians, including 60 women, at its gold mining site.  Around 90 employees are from overseas.

Chhun Thhey, originally from Battambang province, has been making her mark as a surveyor at the company since August 2023, after earning her bachelor’s degree.

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The post Gender No Barrier: Women Excel in Demanding Gold Mining Roles first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

any people will be familiar with the dread when your income no longer covers your expenses; when you’ve exhausted your savings and are sinking ever deeper into debt. In the Mekong Delta, a similar downward spiral is happening. But it’s not the delta’s finances that are draining away – it’s the sand that sustains it. Not its economic stability that is being undermined, but its very foundations.

The Mekong is literally drowning in ‘sand debt’: far more sand is being removed than is being replenished. Without a budget setting out how much sand can be extracted sustainably, this debt will turn into disaster.

If you only look at the headline figures, all seems well with Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and the connected Dong Nai Delta – home to a combined 40 million people, growing cities, thriving economies, and a major regional rice bowl and seafood source. But a closer look reveals some real cause for alarm. The Mekong Delta is sinking. Saltwater is intruding ever further inland. The water table is dropping. All these come with significant costs to communities and nature, as infrastructure, livelihoods and the survival of species are negatively affected.

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Illegal gold mining is threatening Myanmar’s largest inland freshwater lake – which ethnic people in Kachin state depend on for their livelihoods – due to the increasing demand for the precious metal as the country’s economy teeters towards collapse.  

U Aung Ko, a 60-year-old ethnic Shan resident in Ma Mon Kaing village at the southern tip of Indawgyi lake, often uses the lake’s water to cool himself down during the heat of the day.

He grew up in the peaceful surroundings of the lake, like the more than 35,000 people living in 13 landlocked villages around it, and has used the lake’s water and resources to survive.

Indawgyi lake is a designated UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in Mohnyin Township in the southwest of Kachin State. The people living around it are from the Kachin and Red Shan ethnic groups who mainly farm and graze animals around the lake while fishing in the water – their primary source of protein.  

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Kachin State’s Chipwi Township in northernmost Myanmar is known for its pristine forests and crystal-clear water.

But 10 years ago, local residents started noticing the patches of land that had been cleared on the lush mountains surrounding their town, which borders China’s Yunnan province. It started with one patch of land, where all the trees were cut down. Then others followed.

Soon locals saw heavy machinery being moved through their town, heading to those barren plots of land. Then workers started flooding in. They excavated the ground and left open pits, many filled with chemically-laced water, in areas once rich in woodland. The water near those sites was no longer clean.

It became obvious at that stage that the newcomers were looking for something underneath the ground – rare earth, which contains elements widely used in high-tech products like smartphones, computer components, electric vehicles and solar cells.  

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The closure of Myanmar’s biggest mines due to the post-coup conflict has contributed to an 80 percent plummet in export earnings from the sector over the last two years.

Monthly earnings from Myanmar’s mining exports have shrunk from more than US$150 million to only $30 million since the 2019-20 fiscal year.

Although on-off border restrictions imposed by China to limit COVID-19 continue to disrupt trade, much of this 80 percent drop is due to a halt in production at copper mines in Sagaing Region run by Chinese companies Wanbao and Yangtze, which revealed on May 6 that operations had been suspended since soon after the February 2021 military coup.

This has denied the junta a key source of foreign currency, the short supply of which has been indicated by the regime’s imposition of capital controls in recent months.

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The number of illegal rare-earth element mining businesses in northern Kachin State has now increased much greater than the previous years, according to local sources.

Locals say rare-earth mining was seen only in hilly border areas near Panwa before Myanmar’s political change in 2021, but the number of such illegal mining sites has increased since April 2021 and reached an unprecedented level throughout this year.

A local resident in Panwa said: “Before the political change, there were only two or three 3,000-gallon oil bowsers a day. In about April 2021, the number of such oil bowsers reached about 20 a day. But when I counted the other day, over 80 bowsers come a day. The mining in the mountains has spread out to the valleys of Chibwe. The locals are showing their opposition because their water supply and livestock breeding are being harmed.”

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Some 45 kilometers, or 28 miles, up the Mekong River from Phnom Penh, Voi Thy sat and watched as 12 boats pumped sand from the riverbed. Another 11 boats, weighed low by their quarry of freshly mined sand, were making the glacial journey past her home in Roka Koang commune, Kandal province, to the capital.

In late June, 43-year-old Thy was slicing up bottle gourds outside her house, propped up by makeshift wooden stilts that descended down into the collapsed banks of the Mekong.

Each year, she said, the riverbank erosion gets worse. Two large collapses during Cambodia’s rainy season in May and June 2021 saw Thy move her house further from the river. But a more recent collapse in November 2021 forced her to remove a part of her house that was left hanging precariously over the water’s edge.

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The post Mining the Mekong: Land and livelihoods lost to Cambodia’s thirst for sand first appeared on Open Development Mekong.