• Air pollution: elemental mercury released to the air
    • Mercury vapor concentrations in gold shops significantly above the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) threshold limit value (TLV) for occupational exposure to mercury (25 ug/m3) 
  • Hydrological changes: erosion and water impairment
    • Hg levels 3 to 25 times the national standard of 0.0001 mg/L found in river water (Fraser 2009)
    • Mercury and oil is released into the waterways
      • Since 2009, an estimated 1,500 liters of oil from machines and boats associated with ASGM have been spilled in MDD (Brack et al. 2011)
  • Land degradation/desertization - topsoil removal
    • Land could take 500 years to recover (Daley 2016)
  • Species, habitat and biodiversity loss  
  • Deforestation
    • ASGM is the leading cause of forest loss in MDD
    • In two prominent mining zones in MDD, ~6,600 hectares of wetlands and primary tropical forest were destroyed between 2003 and 2009 (Swenson et al. 2011)
    • A recent study (Caballero Espejo et al. 2018) estimates that 64,586 hectares of forest in MDD were lost to gold mining between 2010-2017
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Gold mining deforestation of 1,685 hectares between 2017 and 2018 in La Pampa, MDD. Source: https://maaproject.org/2019/peru-gold-mining-2018/
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La Pampa 2019, post deforestation