Artisanal miners in Ghana. Image Source: Morten Larsen/World Bank.
Part 3 of a multi-part series on understanding artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM).
The purpose of observing and understanding ASM characteristics is not to just confirm its presence. The purpose is to provide the intelligence base needed to support oversight, prioritization, engagement, and reform, in a way that reflects the regulatory context in which the activity is occurring.
As touched on in the previous section, this becomes particularly important because ASM is not a single uniform archetype. The decisions governments, mining companies, and NGOs need to make differ substantially depending on whether activity is formal, informal, or illegal. At the same time, the surface expression of ASM remains broadly similar across these categories. As a result, decision-makers require more than point-in-time observation. They require the ability to understand how activity is distributed, how it is evolving, and how it is interacting with land use, tenure, and operational boundaries. Spatial and temporal characterization at scale becomes a foundational input into the decisions that follow.
In formal ASM contexts, the primary objective is typically not enforcement, but oversight.
Key decisions tend to relate to verification and planning. Governments need to be able to determine whether licensed activity is active, dormant, expanding, or shifting, and whether it is occurring within approved boundaries. They also need to understand where activity is intensifying and whether cumulative surface disturbance is growing beyond what existing governance mechanisms can reasonably manage. This directly influences decisions around inspection schedules, permitting reform, audit prioritization, and resourcing of enforcement agencies.
Mining companies, particularly those operating near formal ASM areas, face similar requirements. They need to understand whether activity is stable and contained or whether it is expanding toward operational boundaries, infrastructure corridors, or areas of planned development. In many cases, formal ASM activity may not represent an immediate risk, but changes over time can indicate increasing pressure that requires government or community engagement or boundary management before friction emerges.
NGOs and development stakeholders also require consistent evidence in this context, particularly where formalization programs are being implemented. The ability to observe whether activity is consolidating into regulated areas, whether disturbance is stabilizing or expanding, and whether new clusters are emerging provides objective feedback on whether formalization and governance efforts are working in practice.
In informal ASM contexts, the primary challenge is often not compliance management but basic visibility.
Governments in these contexts face a different set of decisions. A central question is where limited governance and engagement resources should be directed. Without regional-scale baselining, governments are forced to rely on local reports or isolated site visits, which makes it difficult to understand whether activity is clustered in a small number of high-impact areas or dispersed across large regions. Spatial characterization supports decisions around where to focus pilot formalization programs, where to invest in infrastructure or support services, and where land-use planning and policy reform should be prioritized.
Mining companies and exploration teams operating in informal ASM environments often face a similar information gap. Informal activity can expand into exploration licenses or prospective regions without being detected early. Companies need to understand not only where informal ASM is occurring, but whether activity is migrating toward known mineralized zones, transport corridors, or accessible ore bodies. This information gap poses a material risk for mining companies and explorers.
According to the National Society of Mining, Petroleum and Energy, a driving force behind 2024’s decline in Peru’s copper production is “unauthorized mining operations have increasingly encroached on formal mining concessions, creating security issues and disrupting planned operations” and “Disputes between legitimate concession holders and informal operators have created legal uncertainties that deter investment.”
Temporal characterization becomes particularly important because informal ASM can respond quickly to discoveries, access conditions, and seasonal shifts. Without time-series observation, it becomes difficult to distinguish transient disturbance from sustained activity that may become embedded.
For NGOs and development organizations, informal ASM often represents a core area of focus, particularly in relation to livelihoods, health and safety, and environmental impacts.
An example is the Word Bank’s Achieving Sustainable and Inclusive Artisanal and Small Scale Mining (ASM): A Renewed Framework which is a roadmap to support governments with regulating and fostering ASM development, advocating for long-term investments and partnerships that will help build the necessary infrastructure for a well-regulated and legal ASM sector.
The ability to prioritize intervention requires evidence of scale and change. Understanding whether ASM activity is growing, stabilizing, or shifting into more environmentally sensitive areas informs decisions about where engagement programs will have the greatest effect and where risk mitigation should be prioritized.
In illegal ASM contexts, stakeholders are often aware that activity exists but lack objective insight into how it is evolving. Illegal ASM can include encroachment into protected areas, expansion onto licensed tenements, or activity in restricted land-use zones. In these cases by the time illegal activity becomes visible through incident reporting, enforcement encounters, or security escalations, it has often already expanded to a point where response options are limited and costly.
Governments need timely intelligence to determine where illegal ASM is intensifying, where it is spreading, and where it is likely to intersect with protected areas, critical watersheds, or areas of heightened environmental sensitivity.
An article entitled Police Efforts in Tackling Environmental Crimes Due to Illegal Gold Mining highlights that the effectiveness of countering environmental impacts from illegal gold production channels is constrained by limited human capacity and monitoring technology as well as community support and coordination with diverse stakeholder groups. These observations influence decisions around community and industry engagement, enforcement prioritization, regulatory reform, and allocation of limited operational capacity. They also support decisions about where intervention is feasible and where longer-term governance approaches may be required.
Mining companies and exploration teams face direct operational exposure in this context. Illegal encroachment can affect access, security, infrastructure integrity, ore control, and project viability. The decisions companies need to make often relate to when and where to engage with government, when to increase site security, how to adjust operational planning, and how to document activity in a way that supports accountability and attribution.
For example Southern Copper Corporations 2024 filing to the SEC, noted that the Los Chancas greenfield project has delayed environmental, hydrogeological and geotechnical studies while they work with Peruvian authorities to managing encroaching illegal mining activities. These decisions are difficult to make effectively without objective evidence that shows where activity began, how it expanded, and whether it is continuing to intensify.
NGOs and civil society organizations also operate in this space, particularly where illegal ASM intersects with human rights concerns, community conflict, and environmental harm. Their decisions often relate to where monitoring and engagement should be focused, how to support community-level mitigation, and how to advocate policy interventions that address the underlying drivers of illegal activity. In this context, objective spatial evidence can also help distinguish between isolated activity and systemic regional expansion, which influences the type of response that is appropriate.
Across formal, informal, and illegal ASM contexts, the underlying decisions differ, but the intelligence requirements share common themes. Decision-makers need to understand the spatial and temporal characteristics - where activity is occurring, how it is distributed, whether it is stable or changing, and how it intersects with land use, infrastructure, and mineralized zones. They also need the ability to distinguish persistent patterns from short-term fluctuations, and to track cumulative impacts over time.
These requirements cannot be met reliably through episodic site visits, incident reporting, or static records. They require regional-scale observation and time-series analysis that provide consistent visibility across large areas and across multiple observation periods. Without this, ASM intelligence remains fragmented, and decision-making remains reactive.
The article Remote sensing of artisanal and small-scale mining: A review of scalable mapping approaches calls out the value of analyzing spatial data to inform targeted interventions, identify overlaps with biodiversity hotspots, and support sustainable initiatives as well support regulatory reform and resolve friction between ASM and formal miners and explorers.
It also calls out that while spatially and temporally characterizing ASM at local levels has been successful with remote sensing methods, achieving this at regional scale has been a challenge.
EarthDaily sees value in supporting ASM stakeholders with reform and risk management and is progressing with a solution to provide this intelligence at the scale required.
In the next section, we examine what effective ASM monitoring requires and why consistent spatial and temporal observation is critical for supporting these decisions.