The underestimated global impact of mining on threatened species

Mining reshapes vast areas of Earth’s surface and drives global economic activity, yet its true impact on biodiversity remains underappreciated. Here, we reveal that mining is listed as a threat to over 12,000 species globally, including nearly 6,000 classified as threatened. Spatial analyses indicate that 28% of all threatened species’ ranges intersect with mining footprints—among them over 100 species for which at least 75% of their range is mined, but unrecognized as such by current IUCN assessments. For threatened species with distributions that overlapped mining areas, plants exhibit the greatest average overlap (29%), while birds have the highest proportion of species (48%) intersecting with mines. Mining occurs in areas of unusually high biodiversity, and with higher richness of threatened species. This pressure is poised to intensify as new projects targeting critical minerals could affect over 3,000 threatened species—83% of which lack a mining-threat designation by the IUCN. These findings underscore the urgent need for more comprehensive accounting of mining impacts in conservation planning worldwide.