Artisanal and small-scale gold mining in the Amazon is often reduced to a shocking image: deforestation seen from above, polluted rivers, illegality. Dr. Fernando Fernández argues that this framing, while not wrong, is incomplete. Mining, he says, “is not only complex, but also urgent,” and approaching it from a single angle makes it easy to misunderstand both the problem and the people involved. Because the issue has many different dimensions and everyone has it's own problem definition; and these two combined make it really difficult to find solutions.
The situation blocks any dialogue to find a solution, as the miners will have a proposal, the government another one, the researchers another one – which leave us without a shared vision to find a solution.

Dr. Fernando Fernández is a senior research scientist at the Wyss Academy, focusing on political economy and environmental governance. He leads an interdisciplinary research project on artisanal gold mining and its challenges in Madre de Dios, Peru. Rather than treating mining solely as an environmental issue, he approaches it as a system shaped by incentives, risks, regulations, technologies, and human behavior. By embracing the complexity of the system, he steers clear of solutions that look elegant on paper but fail in practice.

To explain what interdisciplinary research actually looks like in practice, Fernández suggests us to look at the following scenario: Imagine a group of miners adopting a mercury-free technology. From that single change, a wide range of questions immediately emerges. A biologist, would be interested in measuring the impact of mercury reduction on soil and ecosystems; a chemist would focus on the concentration method used by the technology and a lawyer would ask whether adopting this technology helps miners comply with local and international regulations.  

“Different disciplines have different questions about exactly the same statement,” Fernández says, and it is precisely this diversity of questions that creates “better perspectives to look at the same problem.” Without this plurality, research risks addressing only one dimension of mining while leaving others untouched, often with unintended consequences. 

Public debates around gold mining often focus on environmental damage. But Fernández argues that any serious analysis must also account for the livelihoods of people living in mining regions. “People enter mining because it offers a higher income,” he explains. From a labor economics perspective, mining is a high-risk, high-paying livelihood, where higher wages compensate for exposure to danger and uncertainty. 

Those risks are not theoretical. Miners face daily exposure to mercury, as well as security threats that remain poorly documented. “We know very little about security,” Fernández says, even though it is such an important topic in mining areas. One of the research interests at the Wyss Academy is understanding how constant exposure to insecurity affects miners’ willingness to adopt better practices, including replacing mercury with cleaner technologies.

Understanding mining as a livelihood, rather than simply as impact, reframes the discussion. Miners are not choosing between responsibility and irresponsibility in a vacuum. They are navigating a landscape of risks, income volatility, and limited alternatives. 

Deforestation and mercury pollution are the two most visible environmental impacts of artisanal gold mining, and Fernández acknowledges that both are well documented through satellite imagery and environmental studies. Mercury, although less visible, has been extensively studied in rivers, soil, flora, and fauna. 

But focusing exclusively on these impacts can obscure other significant pressures. Fuel consumption, for example, remains largely absent from the debate. Artisanal miners “are the biggest consumers of fuel in the Amazon,” relying heavily on diesel to operate on a daily basis. Despite its scale, this impact is poorly understood. “We know very little about this,” he says, and addressing this knowledge gap is one of the aims of current research efforts. 

This broader view does not dilute environmental concern. Instead, it highlights how partial understandings can lead to partial solutions. 

Formalization is often presented as a straightforward solution: if miners entered the legal system, many problems would disappear. Fernández strongly disagrees. “It’s not enough to convince miners that they need to enter the formal sector,” he explains. Even if miners formalize, they may still be surrounded by informal buyers, suppliers, and transporters. 

“If your buyers remain informal, if your suppliers remain informal, then formality doesn’t pay off,” he says. From the miner’s perspective, formalization is not an isolated decision, but a calculation made within a broader system. “Formalization is not a unilateral decision that miners take,” Fernández emphasizes. “They really look at the whole system.” 

This insight helps explain why formalization rates remain low despite years of policy efforts. Without changes along the entire value chain, individual compliance often becomes economically irrational. 

Even the language used to describe mining outcomes is contested. Fernández notes that terms such as responsible gold, clean gold, ethical gold, and sustainable gold are often used interchangeably, despite referring to different standards and expectations. “There is no fixed definition,” he says. 

For Fernández, the first step is compliance. Responsible gold should meet existing social, labor, and environmental regulations in the country of origin, as well as the regulations imposed by destination markets and refineries. Beyond that, definitions diverge. Some actors focus exclusively on eliminating mercury, while others also require restoration programs to address deforestation. 

Recycled gold, often presented as an alternative to new mining, illustrates the problem. While appealing in theory, Fernández argues that it is “very difficult to implement and verify in practice,” and in some cases simply extends the supply chain without reducing extraction. 

These ambiguities matter because definitions shape incentives, prices, and expectations, often without aligning with what miners can realistically achieve. 

Despite the complexity and the lack of easy answers, Fernández is unequivocal about one thing. The major risk in involving gold mining issues are linked with inaction. Inertia, as explained by Fernández, only reinforce negative feedback loops that make future change even harder. 

Mining, in his view, is not something societies can simply wish away. We expect to see more mining in the future. A better question to ask is not whether mining should exist, but “what type of mining do we want.” Mercury-based or mercury-free, informal or formal, disconnected from markets or linked to responsible buyers. 

To answer that question, he suggests, to see mining not as an isolated problem with a single solution, but as a system that demands equally complex responses.