Artisanal mining and its relationship with riparian biodiversity in Buhweju.
Mineralized landscapes are vital in livelihood provisioning in most rural Africa. Although it is now being noticed that mining of minerals is detrimental to landscapes and mainly affecting rivers and streams that are crucial to downstream communities. In our recent baseline assessment of the artisanal gold mining impacts show unique array of ecosystems and natural resources are suffering from increasing set of threats e.g., loss of riparian vegetation from surface clearing, pollution due to use of heavy metals in the processing, incremental tailings that are inadequately recycled, mix of human activities ranging from small scale to intensive farming, urbanization, waste management, population growth among others.
What is the relationship between artisanal gold mining landscapes and riparian environments? Artisanal gold mining is a heinous approach of hand hoeing the ground to mine the ground in an imbalanced work combined with damaging of soil, water ecosystems that eventuate into deterioration of the valuable resources.
Buhewju landscape is endowed with gold mineral resource that occurs in veins and alluvial deposits along the hill slopes that is mined mainly through artisanal. Despite the efforts to improve the artisanal mining approaches, Buhweju and its communities are contributing to high impacts on riparian biodiversity due to the multiple approaches used, emerging complexity and inconsistent responsibility of miners as a result of variable techniques and environmental conditions.
This work has established a baseline and requires support to undertake synergized and integrated studies that provide solutions such as riparian biodiversity restoration and reduction of pollutants on the landscape. Future activities focus on strengthening the artisanal knowledge on safeguarding the landscape’s environment, extending collaboration and networking; promoting the sharing and development of management and monitoring technologies and strategies.