Illustration of the river basins in our sample and their treatment status.

Our sample are 14,334 river basins across all of Africa, which we observed from 2016–2023.
Shout-out to the Journal of Development Economics editing process that purged our sample from the illustration in Figure 3. 🧂 The correct version of the Figure is attached and in the working paper.

Example of two Angolan mines and their up- and downstream basin systems. Measurements of the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) show a sharp drop at and after the mine site.

How costly is mining pollution for African agriculture? Our new paper finds that downstream water pollution lowers vegetation health by 1.3–1.5%, immediately affecting over 74,000 km² of croplands. We exploit a discontinuity in directed river networks for identification. doi.org/10.1016/j.jd...

Plot illustrating our approach (columns): training data, model predictions, and segmented polygons in three instances (rows): mines in Brazil, Mozambique, and Indonesia.

Where are mining sites actually expanding? Our new paper uses a ML model and satellite imagery to track 147k+ tropical mining sites from 2016–2024. Footprints of these sites grew by 24%, with major expansion in the Amazon, Indonesia & West Africa. doi.org/10.1038/s418...