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Mineral Depletion

Map No. 313

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This map shows the fall in the financial value of a territory’s mineral resources due to current extraction rates. Included here are gold, lead, zinc, iron, copper, nickel, silver, bauxite, and phosphate.

Territories with the highest mineral depletion are Australia, Brazil, Chile and China. Australia is the largest producer of bauxite, Brazil of industrial diamonds, China of tungsten, and South Africa of platinum and gold.

Mineral extraction often causes environmental damage, itself a form of depletion. Territories that are small on this map may lack minerals or have used those worth extracting.

"Peru began a structural adjustment process ... which led to a boom in the mining sector. Rules governing the privatisation of state-owned companies were established and labour laws were weakened significantly." Peru Support Group, 2005

Territory size shows the proportion of all annual mineral depletion that occurred there. Mineral depletion is the loss of potential future income at current prices due to current quantities of minerals extracted.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page