A surge in global gold prices has ignited a renewed mining rush within Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, leading to an alarming acceleration of deforestation in protected areas and pushing mercury contamination to hazardous levels, according to officials and experts.
A recent study, published by the non-governmental organisation Amazon Conservation in collaboration with Brazilian nonprofit Instituto Socioambiental, reveals that illegal mining operations have driven extensive clear-cutting across three conservation zones within the Xingu region.
This area, one of the world’s largest expanses of protected forest, spans the states of Para and Mato Grosso. The analysis combined satellite imagery with crucial ground research to document the destruction. The Terra do Meio Ecological Station, for instance, recorded its first instances of illegal mining in September 2024.
By the close of 2025, miningrelated deforestation there had expanded to cover 30 hectares (74 acres). Similarly, at the Altamira National Forest, illegal mining was responsible for 832 hectares (2,056 acres) of deforestation between 2016 and September 2025.
A new mining front that emerged in 2024 grew to 36 hectares (89 acres) by October 2025, accounting for nearly half of the mining-related deforestation recorded in that unit during the year. Satellite monitoring also detected a clandestine airstrip used by illegal miners at the Nascentes da Serra do Cachimbo Biological Reserve last year.
Illegal mining in the reserve grew from 2 hectares (5 acres) to at least 26.8 hectares (66 acres) in 2025. In 2023, Amazon Conservation teamed up with Earth Genome and the Pulitzer Center to develop the Amazon Mining Watch, a platform that uses satellite imagery to track mining across the Amazon since 2018.
About 496,000 hectares (1,225,640 acres) of rainforest have been cleared for mining since then, including approximately 223,000 hectares (551,045 acres) in the Brazilian Amazon. Amazon Conservation estimates that 80 per cent of mining-related deforestation in Brazil carries a high risk of taking place illegally.
Mining remains a relatively small driver of deforestation in Brazil, where forest loss is largely linked to agribusiness expansion. In 2025, for example, some 579,600 hectares (1,432 acres) of the Brazilian Amazon were cleared, according to official data. About 17,000 hectares (42,000 acres) were related to mining, according to the Mining Watch.
“What makes mining particularly problematic is that it targets protected areas and Indigenous territories,” said Matt Finer, director of Amazon Conservation’s Monitoring of the Andes Amazon program. Protecting Indigenous territories is widely seen as an effective way to curb deforestation in the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest and a key regulator of global climate.
Researchers warn that continued forest loss could accelerate global warming. In 2023, Brazilian authorities launched a major crackdown on illegal gold mining in the Yanomami Indigenous territory in Roraima state, along the border with Venezuela, after a surge led to a humanitarian and health crisis.
Annual growth in newly mined areas there fell sharply after that year, according to Amazon Conservation data. Although mining has not been fully eliminated, nearly all deforestation inside the Yanomami territory — about 5,500 hectares (13,590 acres) — had taken place by 2023.
Still, localised enforcement has not curbed illegal mining across the Amazon. When authorities destroy dredges and equipment in one region, miners often relocate or resume operations once officials leave. Federal prosecutor André Luiz Porreca, who investigates illegal mining in the western Brazilian Amazon, described enforcement as a “cat-and-mouse game.”
“Last year, I took part in an operation that destroyed more than 500 dredges on an Indigenous land,” Porreca said. “The following week, Indigenous people showed me photos proving the miners had already returned.”
Porreca said illegal gold mining is financed by Brazil’s largest criminal organizations, including the Red Command and the First Capital Command, or PCC, which operate in about a third of the cities in the Brazilian Amazon. “They have the money to bankroll these operations. Some dredges cost as much as 15 million reais.”
