Environmental crimes undermine Africa’s demographic opportunity
Weak governance and organised crime risk turning Africa’s ecological wealth into a barrier to clean, inclusive development.
Africa’s demography is strongly in its favour. This is the argument of Jack Goldstone and John May, as published in Foreign Affairs in May 2023. Driven by falling mortality and high fertility, the continent’s population will grow ‘from 1.4 billion today to 2.5 billion by 2050.’ With declining fertility across the rest of the world, the global economy is on a serious downward trajectory unless productive young Africans drive future growth. Contrary to much concern about a youth unemployment curse and resultant uncontrolled immigration into Europe, Goldstone and May state that Africa’s youth are hardly a threat, and instead a ‘remarkable opportunity upon which the prosperity of the entire world depends.’ Yet, this demographic opportunity will only materialise if Africa’s development pathway protects—rather than erodes—the ecological systems and governance institutions upon which livelihoods depend.
The demographic opportunity will only materialise if Africa’s development pathway protects the ecological systems and governance institutions upon which livelihoods depend
While using GDP as a benchmark indicator for prosperity and well-being is misleading (especially because it does not reflect the drawdown of “natural capital”), it is still noteworthy that GDP in sub-Saharan Africa has tripled over the forty years from 1980 to 2020. Still, the authors insist that Africa’s growth story cannot follow that of China’s—industrialisation on that scale would simply drive carbon emissions that neither Africa nor the rest of the world can afford. Therefore, the remaining patches of ecological integrity (many of which are in Africa) must no longer be viewed as “natural capital” but rather as ecological wealth essential for human and economic security.
African countries require ecologically clean, broad-based development if youth demographics are to truly be a dividend. The argument that Africa is not a historical contributor to the global ecological crisis does not exempt the continent and its citizens from calls for clean development. There is only one planet, and humanity collectively overstepped seven of the nine planetary boundaries. When this framework was first proposed in 2009, only three boundaries had been crossed. In the foreword to the 2025 Planetary Health Check Report, Oceanographer Sylvia Earle writes that in the past century, ‘more has been learned than ever before about what makes Earth suitable for life, especially human life, in a fiercely inhospitable universe. At the same time, more has been lost than ever before of the dynamic living systems that underpin the conditions that make possible our existence.’
Despite Trump, the global effort towards cleaner modes of production and consumption (or even ‘net zero’ when the phrase is not being used for greenwashing) has momentum. Given the potential geological endowments of minerals and metals such as copper, lithium, cobalt, uranium and more, many African countries are well-positioned to capitalise on this. It is against the reality of overstepped planetary boundaries and environmental degradation, however, that optimism pertaining to Africa’s economic growth potential must be tempered and balanced with governance and environmental safeguards.
Without the right conditions or a workable recipe, the right ingredients are relatively useless. Risks of new manifestations of the ‘resource curse’ should be taken seriously. Without strong governance institutions, the minerals and metals required for a lower-carbon future will simply be extracted as rent-generating devices for embedded elites. Moreover, and perhaps most concerningly, they will be extracted in environmentally disastrous ways, further destroying the remaining natural wealth in the process.
The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime recently released its 2025 Global Organised Crime Index; the report notes the following: ‘Long-standing trends can still be seen, including the persistence and spread of markets such as drug trafficking, human exploitation and financial crime, but they are becoming more nuanced, and are intersecting with macro-level transformations in geopolitics, technology, environmental stress and conflict’ (emphasis added). What is not sufficiently acknowledged in the ‘critical minerals’ optimism is the risk of organised crime proliferation in its extraction and movement to global markets. In institutionally weak contexts, where the rule of law is ethereal, extraction becomes a form of environmental crime. In parts of West Africa, for instance, artisanal gold extraction has become intertwined with militant financing.
Environmental degradation, however, is not only a function of rampant, unregulated mineral and metal extraction. It is also driven by international consumer demand for ecologically critical fauna and flora that have been reduced to mere commodities in some markets. Demand from Southeast Asia, for instance, has a direct bearing on African countries’ efforts to maintain ecological integrity: ‘Demand for rare timber, wildlife products and illegally mined minerals has drawn significant foreign involvement, while international companies have been implicated in illegally laundering forest resources through global supply chains by reintegrating them into the legal trade.’ Many African countries are the suppliers to satisfy this demand.
National parks in volatile contexts are also increasingly becoming sites of ecological destruction and violence, the very places that would otherwise serve as sustainable tourism hotspots. In April 2025, the US Embassy in Mozambique, for example, issued a security alert that ‘terrorists attacked villages on the edge of the Niassa Special Reserve near Nairoto, before entering the reserve and taking hostages at a private hunting lodge.’ Tourism is crucial as a complement to the rush for ‘critical minerals’—mining is fundamentally finite, the resources are exhaustible. To the contrary, tourism (especially wildlife or adventure tourism) relies on sustaining the ecological foundation that facilitates it.
Institutional resilience against organised crime and for broad-based development will have to improve rapidly
Clean industrialisation is imperative if Africa is to benefit from a youthful demographic. Yet, the reality is that, if the continent’s critical minerals are going to contribute to that end, institutional resilience against organised crime and for broad-based development will have to improve rapidly. Strengthening the rule of law in natural resource sectors, improving transparency across supply chains and investing in ecosystem protection as economic infrastructure are central to that resilience. Debt-for-nature swaps and ecotourism are crucial for labour-absorptive economic development, and neither can happen if the remaining natural wealth continues to collapse. Africa’s demographic prospects hinge on preventing environmental crime from hollowing out the ecological foundations of development.
Image: geralt/Pixabay
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