The government of West Sumatra plans to move forward with a legal pathway for up to 300 small mines operating illegally in the heavily forested province, joining several other devolved governments grappling with how to treat the vast number of unlicensed mines operating across Indonesia.
“Environmental damage brings long-term problems, therefore we can’t stay silent,” West Sumatra Governor Mahyeldi Ansarullah said in a statement.
If approved by Indonesia’s mining and energy ministry, West Sumatra could add substantially to the total number of “community mining zones” already created by the government to date.
A crucial distinction is that this deregulation initiative is expanding on paper but remains incipient in practice.
By 2024, Indonesia had agreed to 1,215 of these Wilayah Pertambangan Rakyat mining zones in 19 of the country’s 38 provinces, with the zones applying to extraction of commodities like gold and sand. Crucially, however, the government has so far awarded only a handful of the practical permits that actually allow a mine to operate.
The development in West Sumatra takes place amid a nationwide crackdown by a military-led forestry task force, which has seized millions of hectares of unlicensed forest operations, shifting its focus from plantations in 2025 to mining in 2026.
The government of West Sumatra in 2025 issued calls for a crackdown on illegal mining, but a change in tactics is now underway, recent statements by Mahyeldi indicate.
“Regulations must be followed,” the governor added. “But we also have to prepare solutions in order for people to be able to earn a living in the right way.”
The head of West Sumatra’s energy and mining agency, Helmi Heriyanto, said there were between 200 and 300 illegal mining operations active in the province of 5.8 million people.
Helmi estimated these mines account for around 6 trillion rupiah (around US$360 million) in losses to the public purse. That amount reflects just one of Indonesia’s 38 provinces, highlighting the extent to which costs to criminality archipelago-wide are vast and difficult to calculate.
In 2025, Indonesia’s Attorney General’s Office said an illegal tin mining scandal on the island of Bangka, which is between the mainland of Sumatra and Singapore, had cost 300 trillion rupiah (US$17.8 billion) in state losses, a fifth more than the health budget of the world’s fourth-most-populous country this year.
In West Sumatra, most mines are in the forested upland that rises from Sumatra’s western coast into the Barisan mountain range, which includes many of the remaining habitats of the critically endangered Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica).
Many of these mines are illegal gold mining operations responsible for extreme damage to both public health and local ecology.
The international price of gold has surged by more than 70 per cent over the last year, as central banks stockpile bullion and investors acquire the precious metal in response to political uncertainty and inflation.
Elsewhere, a large share of community mining zones reflect sand mining sites used primarily in cement, demand for which is also growing due to infrastructure and urbanisation.
Gold opportunity
West Sumatra’s governor is a highly conservative former mayor of the provincial capital, Padang, from the Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Prosperous Justice Party, PKS.
Mahyeldi said officials in West Sumatra were now drafting new rules for community mining zones, known in Indonesia as WPR, which would be presented to the national Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources for approval.
The governor said the policy shift was not about legalising illegal gold mining; instead, framing it as a pragmatic form of harm reduction.
The reforms would enable communities to mine with improved safety, he said, and afford the devolved governments in West Sumatra greater oversight of environmental compliance.
Mahyeldi will propose at least 301 blocks across nine regencies as WPRs, which would include gold and sand mining.
The proposed community mining zones will be located in nine of West Sumatra’s 12 districts: Agam, Dharmasraya, the Mentawai Islands, Pasaman, Sijunjung, Solok, South Solok, Tanah Datar and West Pasaman.
Legally permitted community mines are not a new development in how countries tackle these highly damaging but hard-to-regulate operations; governments from Peru to Tanzania have created legal routes to formalise small-scale mining.
In 2024, the director of minerals and coal at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources said the government had signed off on the designation of 1,215 of these Wilayah Pertambangan Rakyat, “People’s Mining Zones.”
This covered a total area of 66,593 hectares (165,000 acres), implying that an average for each of these 1,215 mining zones would be an area larger than 100 city blocks, or around 71 football fields, according to the sport’s governing body, FIFA.
To date, no WPR mining zones have been established in West Sumatra province among this total of 1,215.
Jambi, a contiguous province to the east of West Sumatra, already has 117 community mining zones approved — but no active mining permits as of 2024.
In January, Mongabay Indonesia reported from Jambi, near the West Sumatra border, on the expansion of illegal gold mining in a buffer forest of Kerinci Seblat National Park, the largest old-growth rainforest in Sumatra.
Civil society response
At least 267 people were killed in West Sumatra province in November 2025, with 70 people still missing almost three months later in February, after Cyclone Senyar made landfall over the north of Sumatra Island overnight on Nov. 26 and 27.
Independent scientists and Indonesia’s government have blamed climate change and the impact of mining in forests for exacerbating flash flooding that killed more than 1,000 people in Sumatra during last year’s catastrophe.
“First and foremost, the main problem with mining is ecological damage — so converting illegal mining to legal mining isn’t a good solution for the environment,” said Diki Rafiqi, director of the West Sumatra office of the Legal Aid Institute, a civil society organisation.
Civil society organisations remain concerned about a range of problems from expanding a new permit class for mining in forest zones.
It remains unclear how the government would treat the use of mercury by any permitted individual gold mines in community zones, which is subject to international agreement under the Minamata Convention on Mercury.
“There’s no such thing as a problem-free mine, whether it’s legal or illegal,” said Hendro Sangkoyo, founder of the School of Democratic Economics in Jakarta, the capital city.
Hendro spent more than five years living with small-scale gold miners on the slopes of Mount Halimun, south of Jakarta, where around 1,000 families suffered the effects of mercury and sodium cyanide, both of which are used to separate gold from ore.
Concerns remain that local elites could coalesce local residents to apply for a community mining permit, a dynamic scientists say is common in parts of the palm oil industry where palm barons seek to exploit preferential arrangements for smallholder growers.
The Legal Aid Institute’s Diki said government risked “normalising environmental crimes in the name of poverty.”
By 2024, the government had awarded only 82 of these Izin Pertambangan Rakyat community mining permits , a number that is expected to rise.
This story was published with permission from Mongabay.com.
