As Ghana pushes mining in forests, a cautionary tale from a fading forest

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 in the reserve since 2018, when Heritage Imperial first obtained a license to prospect for gold there.

The prospecting permit obtained by the company in October 2017 was converted into a full-fledged industrial mining license in June 2020. In April 2022, Heritage received another exploitation license to mine in a different section of the reserve. Between its two claims, the company has unfettered access to almost the entire reserve — or whatever is left of it.

In his 2021 report, then-environment minister Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, accused Heritage Imperial of destroying the Apamprama forest and polluting the Offin River. The Oda River cuts through the reserve before joining the Offin (also spelled Ofin) further south of Apamprama. The company allowed bulk mining activities even when it held only an exploration license, the report said.

Heritage Imperial didn’t respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment by the time of publishing. In public statements, the company’s managing director, Donald Emmanuel Entsuah, has denied the company was responsible for the damage, saying other miners were illegally occupying its concessions.

Industrial operators misuse licenses, Frimpong-Boateng’s report alleged, from companies not implementing environmental mitigation measures to concession holders allowing illegal miners to “buy” sections of their concessions.

Jasper Abembia Ayelazuno, a social scientist at Ghana’s University for Development Studies, told Mongabay that legality was no guarantee mining wasn’t harming protected areas. “It is laughable for a government concerned about the destruction of the environment to think that large-scale mining is fine because they present a report on how they will protect the environment,” Ayelazuno said.

While political leaders, companies and their advocates bicker over who is responsible for Apamprama’s destruction, its impacts are being felt in communities neighboring the reserve.

Over thousands of years, erosion of gold-bearing rocks by rivers and streams has deposited gold-enriched…