Paper short abstract:

People engage in sand mining as a consequence of low education, unemployment and disruption of existing livelihoods, which leads to job creation, construction of critical buildings, income and taxes. But, sand mining also destructs the environment and existing infrastructure and causes pollution.

Paper long abstract:

Construction-sand is the most used solid material and is central in developing societies and economies. Recent years’ increasing focus on global scarcity of sand has focused on global issues arising from it and on environmental consequences of the extraction. However, comprehensive research describing the complexity of sand mining in low-income nations is lacking. Here we review literature from Sub-Saharan African to outline the drivers and effects of construction-sand mining in 13 Sub-Saharan countries. We show that at regional and national level, population growth and rapid urbanisation are the main drivers for the growing sand mining activities observed in all of the investigated countries. Environmental consequences are solely negative and often observed at or in the vicinity of the mining sites and can be immediate or occur with a time lag. For humans and the built-environment, the positive effects are seen at a variety of levels spanning national and regional through the creation of necessary buildings and income, taxes and revenues. At an individual level, little or low education, unemployment and disruption of traditional livelihoods are main drivers for people engaging in sand mining. The extraction of the material has negative consequences in the form of pollution and destruction of infrastructure and impact not only people involved in the mining industry but also nearby communities. We propose that repeated sand mining monitoring at a country-scale using satellite images has the ability to become a standard monitoring approach to tackle the growing use and help ensure a sustainable future for the resource.