"Unregulated Mining Along Rivers in Mainland Southeast Asia" Stimson Center, 24 November 2025

[...]

Stimson’s new interactive dashboard uses satellite imagery to unveil the massive scale of more than 2,400 sites for unregulated in-situ leach (rare earth), heap leach (gold, copper, nickel, manganese) and alluvial mining (gold, silver, tin) activities on or alongside 43 rivers in mainland Southeast Asian countries of Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. The dashboard also includes water quality information for the few rivers where testing has been done. The Stimson Center plans to update the dashboard with new mining sites and new testing data as it becomes available.

[...]

Drivers of this unregulated mining activity in mainland Southeast Asia include the increasing global demand for rare earth elements, record high global commodity prices for gold, and China’s exporting of its own rare earth extractives industry to peripheral areas just outside of its own borders. [...]

Myanmar:

[...] Currently, there are at least 549 unregulated in-situ leaching rare earth mining sites in Myanmar.

[...]

Unregulated gold mining has been a viable economic activity in Myanmar for decades for artisanal and industrial firms [...] Today, more than 340 heap leach sites are found throughout Myanmar mostly located within upland areas and officially recognized self-administered zones close to China’s border.

Laos:

[...] Currently, at least 26 rare earth mines are operating in Laos with the first going into operation in 2022, shortly after the coup in Myanmar, which likely pushed China’s rare earth mining activity into Laos.

[...]

517 unregulated mines were identified in Laos across the heap leach (145 mines) and alluvial (346 mines) dataset. An initial boom prior to 2016 [...] and the recent uptick in the price of gold has caused a new boom of heap leach mining in Laos’s northern provinces with 26 new mines in 2024 and 31 new mines in 2025.

[...] More than 258 heap leach mines and alluvial mining sites identified in the Sekong Basin should be a cause for concern to Cambodia’s Stung Treng Province located in the Sekong downstream.

Cambodia:

[...] A new heap leach mining site was developed in late 2024 linked to several other nearby alluvial mining sites, and new alluvial mining sites have opened in Virachey National Park in 2025, suggesting not all illegal or unregulated activity has stopped. Virachey National Park is home to threatened species [...] and was described as an “untouched haven for biodiversity” in Cambodia’s state-run media in January 2025.