BANGKOK — A new satellite analysis from U.S. think tank the Stimson Center has identified 517 suspected mines along rivers in Laos, including major tributaries of the Mekong, Southeast Asia’s longest river, heightening concerns about contamination of waterways that sustain local communities. Stimson has not ground-truthed the mine sites identified through satellite imagery, but Mongabay spoke by phone with several government officials in Laos’s southern border province of Attapeu, home to 188 mines in the data, who said illegal mining remains widespread despite recent crackdowns. “We still see officials carrying out inspections and confiscating equipment” from illegal mines in Attapeu, said one government official who spoke to Mongabay on condition of anonymity due to the limited press freedoms in Laos. The analysis shines new light on the scale of mining in river basins across mainland Southeast Asia. The issue previously caught the spotlight in northern Thailand earlier this year after dangerous levels of arsenic were found to be flowing downstream from unregulated gold mines in Myanmar’s Shan state. A proliferation of rare earth mines in Laos and Myanmar has also raised concerns about deforestation, displacement of local communities, and the transboundary contamination of rivers flowing downstream into Thailand and Vietnam. Using satellite imagery analysis, the Stimson Center has produced a dataset of various mining types identified across mainland Southeast Asia’s river basins. Image by Emilie Languedoc / Mongabay. Besides Laos, the analysis flagged 1,868 mines in Myanmar, 17 in Cambodia and one in Malaysia, believed to be a mix of gold,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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