Integrating action to reduce mercury pollution from artisanal and small-scale gold mining into National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans

Purpose and Scope of the Technical Guidance

Mercury (Hg, atomic number 80) is a potent neurotoxin, negatively impacting both nature and the people closely reliant on intact ecosystems for nutrition, livelihoods, and culture. It is considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be one of the 10 chemical substances with greatest health concerns, and has also been shown to be a major stressor to biological diversity (e.g., Scheuhammer et al. 2015). Because it persists for long periods in the environment, can travel long distances via air and water, is used in several industrial processes and in products, and yet can’t be destroyed once it has been mobilized, it creates a unique global challenge. In 2017, the UN Minamata Convention on Mercury entered into force to “protect the human health and the environment from anthropogenic emissions and releases of mercury”, and today, there are 152 countries have become Party to the Convention.

The current greatest source of mercury released to the environment is from gold mining (Qiu et al. 2025; UNEP 2019), where it is used in gold amalgamation. Under Article 2 of the Minamata Convention, gold mining conducted by individual miners or small enterprises with limited capital investment and production is termed artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM). While gold mining operations using mercury are called small-scale, actual mining operations on the ground may be bigger in scale using more equipment and having larger capital. This document intends the term ASGM to refer to gold mining and its processing using mercury at various scales. Note that this document does not cover industrial or large scale gold mining which is generally done using non-mercury processes for extracting the gold.

The purpose of this document is to provide support to Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in the development of their NBSAPs, in places where artisanal and small-scale gold mining is taking place. This current document is a follow-up to the technical report (Secretariat of the Minamata Convention on Mercury 2024) accompanying the Minamata Convention’s Decision MC-5/17, which highlighted the interconnected challenges of mercury pollution and biodiversity loss, advocating for coordinated implementation of the two Conventions to generate co-benefits. It emphasized integrated policies, collaborative efforts, and shared strategies to reduce mercury's impact on ecosystems while advancing biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. As a follow-up, this current document provides step-by-step recommendations for how to integrate mercury pollution from ASGM into NBSAPs.

Citation

Secretariat of the Minamata Convention on Mercury & The Nature Conservancy. (2025). Integrating action to reduce mercury pollution from artisanal and small-scale gold mining into the Kunming–Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans: Technical support document (UNEP/MC/COP.6/INF/27). Minamata Convention on Mercury.