In a historic victory for environmental conservation, the controversial Legislative Instrument (L.I.) 2462 has been officially consigned to history.

Following months of national outcry and relentless advocacy from civil society, the Environmental Protection (Mining in Forest Reserves) Revocation Instrument, 2025, matured into law on Wednesday, December 10, 2025.

The maturation of this law effectively strips the President of the power to authorise industrial mining within the nation’s protected forest belts.

More significantly, it shifts the legal landscape from regulated entry to total prohibition, triggering some of the harshest criminal penalties in Ghana’s legal code.

L.I. 2462 had long been described by environmental activists as a death warrant for Ghana's green lungs.

By granting the Executive the discretion to allow mining in reserves under certain conditions, critics argued it created a legal loophole that opened up forest reserves to industrial mining in a way that undermines forest protection.

The Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah, laid the Revocation Instrument in Parliament as a cornerstone of the government’s renewed efforts towards the fight against illegal mining, also known as galamsey."

With its maturation, any entity—be it small-scale or a large-scale industrial firm—currently operating within these reserves is now in immediate violation of national law.

The most critical consequence of this revocation is the immediate application of the Minerals and Mining (Amendment) Act, 2019 (Act 995), to any activity within forest zones.

Without the legal cover of L.I. 2462, mining in a forest reserve is now treated as a high-degree criminal offence.

Under the current legal framework, the jail term for illegal mining has been drastically sharpened to deter offenders:

Offense Type	New Statutory Jail Term	Financial Penalty
Mining in Restricted Areas (Forests)	15 to 25 Years' Imprisonment	10,000 to 15,000 penalty units
Foreigners Involved in Illegal Mining	20 to 25 Years' Imprisonment	100,000 to 300,000 penalty units
Aiding and Abetting Mining in Reserves	15 to 25 Years' Imprisonment	Same as principal offender

"The law no longer recognises 'authorised' mining in these zones. Any individual found with a shovel or an excavator in a forest reserve now risks spending a quarter of a century behind bars," a legal expert from the Ministry noted following the maturation.

A Victory for Civil Society

For years, many environmental and civil-society groups argued that the previous regulations faced fierce criticism from environmental activists and the public for their role in exacerbating the damaging effects of illegal mining.

The move to revoke the instrument is seen as a direct response to the fierce criticism from groups like the Media Coalition Against Galamsey and the Ghana Environmental Trust.

The revocation is expected to:

• Halt all current prospecting and exploration activities within globally significant biodiversity areas (GSBAs).
• Empower the Military and Forest Rangers to arrest and prosecute anyone on-site without the need to verify special presidential permits.
• Protect major water bodies whose headwaters reside within these forest reserves.

As the government moves to enforce this new reality, the message to the mining industry is clear: the forest is a no-go zone, and the price of entry is now a decades-long prison sentence.