ESG in Colombia: Mining Guide | Veta Madre Review

ESG in Colombia is not a box you tick at the end of a feasibility study. In Colombian mining it decides where you can drill, who you must sit down with, what your water permit says and whether a lender will pick up the phone. Pull up a chair. This is our field guide to environmental, social and governance issues in Colombian mining, written for investors who want the facts and not the brochure.

Walk enough ground here, from the river gravels of the Nechí to the old adits of Marmato, and one lesson keeps coming back. The rock decides whether there is a deposit. The licence, the community and the water decide whether there is a mine. If you follow Colombian stocks, and especially Colombian mining stocks, this page is the map of what moves permits, financing and valuations beneath the headlines.

What ESG means for a mining investor in Colombia

ESG stands for environmental, social and governance. It asks three plain questions of a mining project. Is it harming land, water or air beyond what law and good practice allow? Does it have the trust and legal consent of its neighbours? Is the company honest and transparent about its money and risks?

In Colombia those questions become legal steps with names and deadlines: an environmental licence, a prior consultation, a forest reserve removal, a páramo boundary. Miss one and a project can stall for years. So ESG risk here is, in practice, permitting risk, and permitting risk is valuation risk. Lenders often add their own standards on top of Colombian law.

For the wider picture of how foreign capital approaches the country, see our Investing in Colombia coverage. For the step-by-step on titles and licences, our Permits & Licensing section goes deeper.

Environmental: licensing, water, páramos and mercury

Who issues environmental licences for mines in Colombia

A mining title lets you explore and later exploit. To build and operate a mine you also need an environmental licence, from one of two levels of authority.

The Autoridad Nacional de Licencias Ambientales (ANLA), the national environmental licensing agency created by Decreto-Ley 3573 de 2011, handles the largest projects. Under Decreto 1076 de 2015, ANLA licenses metal and precious-stone mines that will move 2,000,000 tonnes or more of ore and waste rock per year.
Below the national thresholds, the regional environmental authorities, the Corporaciones Autónomas Regionales (CARs), are competent to grant or deny environmental licences, including for mining. Their practices and timelines vary.

The licence rests on an environmental impact study and carries conditions on water, discharges, waste and closure. Water permits trip up even operating mines, because they are specific and audited.

Páramos: why you cannot mine there

A páramo is a high Andean wetland-grassland ecosystem, usually above the tree line, that acts like a sponge: it catches cloud moisture and releases it slowly into the streams that supply towns and cities below. Colombia treats páramos as strategic ecosystems for water.

In 2016, in Sentencia C-035 de 2016, the Constitutional Court struck down provisions that had allowed some mining and hydrocarbon activities to continue in páramos, finding that such activity was incompatible with the state duty to protect them and with the right to water. The Court also held that when the Ministry of Environment delimits a páramo and departs from the reference map prepared by the Alexander von Humboldt Institute, it must justify the choice with science that gives greater protection.

Congress then passed Ley 1930 de 2018, the Ley de Páramos, signed by President Juan Manuel Santos on July 31, 2018. Article 5 prohibits mineral exploration and exploitation in páramos. Article 18 deals with existing activities: substitution of mining must be accompanied by conservation and restoration plans, and the Ministry of Mines and Energy and the national mining agency must design a substitution programme that includes closure and labour reconversion for small traditional miners.

Santurbán: the case every investor should know

The Santurbán páramo in Santander and Norte de Santander sits above one of the country’s best-known gold districts. In Sentencia T-361 de 2017, the Constitutional Court voided the 2014 delimitation (Resolución 2090 de 2014) because affected people had not taken part, and ordered the Ministry of Environment to issue a new boundary through a prior, broad and deliberative participatory process.

As of this writing, that new delimitation is still pending. In August 2026 the Ministry issued Resolución 0970 de 2026, which redrew and extended a temporary natural resources reserve zone of about 75,432 hectares until March 4, 2029, as part of what the minister called a progressive and participatory delimitation. In September 2026, after the environment minister was declared impeded, the agriculture minister was designated ad hoc minister under Decreto 1407 de 2026 to take the Santurbán decisions. Projects in the district are directly exposed to how this ends.

Field note: When a company says its project is “outside the páramo,” ask which páramo line they mean: the Humboldt reference area, the 2014 resolution, the temporary reserve, or a future final boundary. In Santurbán those are not the same map, and the difference can be a whole ridge. Ask to see the overlay, not just the sentence.

Forest reserves and sustracción

Large parts of Colombia sit inside forest reserve zones created under Ley 2 de 1959. Before mining there, the area must be formally removed from the reserve, a process called sustracción, decided by the Ministry of Environment on the basis of technical, economic, social and environmental studies. Article 34 of the Mining Code (Ley 685 de 2001) lets the mining authority authorise mining in the removed area only after that environmental decision is final, and the applicant carries the compensation and restoration obligations.

Mercury: banned in mining since 2018

Informal gold miners use mercury to bind fine gold into an amalgam, then burn the mercury off. It ends up in rivers, fish and people. Colombia legislated against it in Ley 1658 de 2013, which gave the sector a five-year transition. According to ANLA, the prohibition on mercury use in gold mining came into force on July 16, 2018.

Colombia also joined the global treaty on the metal. Congress approved the Minamata Convention on Mercury through Ley 1892 de 2018, the Constitutional Court upheld that law in Sentencia C-275 de 2019, and Colombia deposited its instrument of ratification with the UN Secretary-General on August 26, 2019.

For a listed company, the real question is whether the ore it buys, or the small-scale miners it partners with, are mercury-free, and how that is checked.

Tailings, closure and reclamation

Tailings are the ground rock left after the metal is recovered. Since August 2020 the benchmark has been the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management, from a review co-convened by the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), the UN Environment Programme and the Principles for Responsible Investment.

On closure, the Ministry of Mines and Energy announced in July 2026 that Decreto 0742 de 2026 is the first comprehensive mine closure regulation in Colombia. It makes closure a mandatory stage of the project life cycle, with measures that run from exploitation through post-closure monitoring, with progressive, temporary, early and final closure modes. Expect closure costs to become a sharper line item in technical reports.

Biodiversity and rivers

Colombia’s courts act on biodiversity. In Sentencia T-622 de 2016 the Constitutional Court recognised the Atrato River in Chocó as a subject of rights and ordered plans to decontaminate it and eradicate illegal mining in the department.

Social: consultation, communities and security

What is consulta previa

Consulta previa, or prior consultation, is the fundamental right of ethnic communities to be consulted, in good faith and before the decision, on measures and projects that directly affect them. Its legal basis is ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, approved in Colombia by Ley 21 de 1991, and the 1991 Constitution, whose Article 330 requires that natural resource exploitation in Indigenous territories proceed without harm to the cultural, social and economic integrity of the communities.

It covers Indigenous, Afro-Colombian, Palenquero, Raizal and Rom communities. The process is run by the Dirección de la Autoridad Nacional de Consulta Previa within the Ministry of the Interior, created in its current form by Decreto 2353 de 2019. Sentencia SU-123 de 2018 defined direct effect broadly, covering livelihoods, culture and territory.

Is it a veto? The courts have repeatedly said ordinary consultation is not. Without agreement, the state can still decide, subject to a proportionality test. But in exceptional cases of intense direct effect, such as relocation of a community, storage of toxic materials on its land, or measures that threaten its survival, the Court has required free, prior and informed consent.

Popular consultations: the municipal votes

A popular consultation (consulta popular) is a different tool: a municipal yes-or-no vote. Several towns used them to reject mining or oil. The best known was Cajamarca, Tolima, on March 26, 2017, where about 98 percent of voters rejected mining, a direct blow to the La Colosa gold project then held by AngloGold Ashanti.

The courts then narrowed the tool. In Sentencia SU-095 de 2018 the Constitutional Court held that a popular consultation is not the right mechanism to decide on subsoil exploration and exploitation, because that competence belongs to the Nation, and a municipal “no” would act as a veto. It urged Congress to create proper coordination mechanisms between the Nation and territories. In Sentencia C-053 de 2019 (February 13, 2019) it struck down Article 33 of Ley 136 de 1994, which had made such votes mandatory when mining threatened significant land-use change.

Field note: A legal win is not a social licence. A company can be right about the law and still find the access road blocked. Look for the boring evidence: signed agreements, meeting minutes, a working grievance log, local hiring numbers. The projects that move are the ones where the community liaison has worn out a pair of boots.

Artisanal and small-scale mining, and formalisation

Colombia has a long tradition of small-scale gold mining, much of it informal. Ley 2250 de 2022, issued July 11, 2022, sets a special framework for legalisation and formalisation: it defines traditional mining, creates a unified formalisation plan, a mining development fund for subsistence and small-scale miners, and a temporary environmental licence for formalisation. It bars mining in national and regional parks, protective forest reserves, páramos and Ramsar wetlands.

Some listed producers have built formalisation into their business model. Aris Mining reports that about 2,800 miners worked under its Contract Mining Partner model at Segovia at year-end 2024, and in October 2026 it said it had about 4,000 formalised miners across 46 units, with a target of 8,000 within four years. Those are company figures; see our profile of Aris Mining.

Security and illegal mining

Illegal mining is the biggest single ESG problem in Colombian gold. The annual government and UNODC survey, published by the Ministry of Mines and Energy on October 2, 2026, found 118,410 hectares with evidence of alluvial gold exploitation in 2025, up 4.5 percent from 2024. Of that area, 75 percent was illicit, 21 percent had technical or environmental permits, and 4 percent was in transition to legality.

Illegal mining also reaches into formal titles. Reuters reported in 2021 that thousands of illegal miners worked tunnels and clandestine plants around Zijin Mining’s Buriticá mine in Antioquia, that an armed group took a cut of their output, and that the company cited losses of about 20 percent of first-quarter production. See our Zijin Mining profile and our Regions guides for where these pressures concentrate.

Two frameworks shape the response. The Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights guide how companies work with security forces; Colombia’s government reports on them through a multi-stakeholder Mining and Energy Committee on Security and Human Rights. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2011) set the protect, respect and remedy framework behind Colombia’s national action plan on business and human rights.

Local employment and royalties

Mining pays the state royalties, distributed through the General Royalties System (Sistema General de Regalías), which rests on Articles 360 and 361 of the Constitution and is regulated by Ley 2056 de 2020 (September 30, 2020). Under that law, 20 percent goes as direct allocations to producing and port areas, plus an extra 5 percent for producing municipalities, with the rest spread across local, regional, science and environmental funds. Whether that money visibly reaches the mining town often shapes local opinion. Our Royalties & Taxes section covers rates and reforms.

Governance: transparency, titles and disclosure

Colombia and EITI

Colombia committed to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in 2013 and was admitted as a candidate country in October 2014. In June 2018 the EITI Board found it had made satisfactory progress. In its 2022 validation, the score was awarded on June 12, 2023: a moderate overall score of 80 points.

Anti-corruption and the title registry

Ley 1778 de 2016 makes companies liable for transnational bribery, investigated and sanctioned by the Superintendencia de Sociedades. Canadian-listed issuers also file annual payment reports under Canada’s Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act (ESTMA), which covers payments of C$100,000 or more in a category to any government, including Colombian ones.

Mining titles are administered by the Agencia Nacional de Minería (ANM), created by Decreto 4134 de 2011 and attached to the Ministry of Mines and Energy. Since December 2019 applications run through AnnA Minería, the ANM’s integrated system, which overlays environmental layers on proposed areas. A title search there is basic due diligence.

Disclosure standards for listed companies

For companies listed in Canada, NI 43-101 technical reports must include a section on environmental studies, permitting and social or community impact, covering permit status, waste and water management, community agreements and closure costs, scaled to the project stage. Colombian securities issuers have their own rule: Superintendencia Financiera Circular Externa 031 de 2021 requires disclosure of social, environmental and climate matters using the TCFD recommendations and SASB standards. A credible board names who oversees sustainability and how often.

How listed companies report ESG in Colombia

The Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA) runs independent, multi-stakeholder audits of individual mine sites, with achievement levels of IRMA 50, 75 and 100. ICMM members commit to its mining principles and site-level validation. The World Gold Council’s Responsible Gold Mining Principles, launched in 2019, require external assurance. And in October 2021 the Asociación Colombiana de Minería adopted the Mining Association of Canada’s Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) protocols, the ninth association worldwide to do so, committing to implementation within five years.

Three factual examples from companies active in Colombia:

Aris Mining (TSX: ARIS) published its third annual sustainability report for 2024, using SASB as the primary framework, referencing TSM through the Colombian association and noting an application to the Voluntary Principles. It disclosed that Marmato exceeded its water extraction permit and that a permit modification was filed on March 31, 2025. The report does not state that it was externally assured.
Mineros (TSX: MSA) said its 2023 sustainability report used GRI standards as a reference, followed SASB guidance and responded to TCFD recommendations, and that it adheres to the UN Global Compact. It reported that ICONTEC certified Mineros Colombia’s zero waste management system in 2023.
AngloGold Ashanti (NYSE: AU) is an ICMM company member. In October 2021 ANLA archived the environmental licence application for its Quebradona copper-gold project in Antioquia, a decision upheld in 2022; the company aims to file a new environmental impact assessment by 2027, according to MINING.COM.

Field note: Read the sustainability report from the back. The assurance statement and the permit non-compliances usually sit near the end, and they tell you more than the photographs up front. If there is no assurance statement, that is an answer too.

What investors should look for: a practical checklist

Licence status. Is there an environmental licence, from ANLA or a CAR, and for what scope? Is it final or under appeal?
Exclusion zones. Does the title overlap a páramo, national park, Ramsar wetland or Ley 2 forest reserve? Has sustracción been granted?
Consultation status. Has the Ministry of the Interior certified whether ethnic communities are present? If so, is consulta previa complete, and with what agreements?
Water. What are the water concession and discharge permits, and has the company disclosed any exceedances?
Mercury-free processing. Does the company buy ore or partner with small-scale miners, and how does it verify they are mercury-free?
Security protocols. Does it follow the Voluntary Principles, and how does it manage illegal mining on or near its title?
Community agreements and grievances. Are there signed agreements, a working grievance mechanism and published resolution figures?
Independent audits. Is there external assurance, an IRMA audit, TSM verification or WGC principles assurance?
Closure. Is there a costed closure plan in the technical report, consistent with the new closure rules?

See who is working where on our Colombian mining companies tracker and read our site visits in Field Reports.

The Friday ESG story

Every Friday we tell one story of who is doing good in Colombian mining, and how: a formalisation scheme that pays miners, a water plant that cleaned a creek, a consultation that ended in an agreement both sides honour. We report the numbers and the caveats too. Know a story we should tell? send us a tip. To get it in your inbox, subscribe to The Vein.

Frequently asked questions

What is consulta previa?

The right of ethnic communities to be consulted in good faith before a project that directly affects them, based on ILO Convention 169 (Ley 21 de 1991) and the 1991 Constitution. It is not a veto, though consent is required in exceptional cases such as relocation.

Is mercury banned in Colombian mining?

Yes. Ley 1658 de 2013 set a transition, and the ban on mercury use in gold mining took effect on July 16, 2018. Colombia also ratified the Minamata Convention on Mercury, depositing its instrument on August 26, 2019.

What is a páramo and why can’t you mine there?

A páramo is a high Andean ecosystem that stores and releases water for the towns below. Ley 1930 de 2018, Article 5, prohibits mineral exploration and exploitation in páramos, following the Constitutional Court’s Sentencia C-035 de 2016.

Who issues environmental licences for mines in Colombia?

ANLA licenses large projects, including metal mines moving 2,000,000 tonnes or more of material per year. Below that threshold the regional environmental authorities (CARs) are competent. A mining title from the ANM is a separate requirement.

Can a town vote to ban mining in Colombia?

In practice, no. SU-095 de 2018 held that popular consultations cannot decide on subsoil exploitation, and C-053 de 2019 struck down the rule making such votes mandatory.

How much alluvial gold mining in Colombia is illegal?

According to the government and UNODC survey published in October 2026, 75 percent of the 118,410 hectares with evidence of alluvial gold exploitation in 2025 was illicit.

ESG in Colombia rewards homework and punishes shortcuts. We will keep walking it with you, one Friday story and one permit at a time.

Educational information only, not investment advice. See our Disclosure & Editorial Policy.

ESG in Colombian Mining