Diamond Sourcing & Sustainable Rings Guide
Eight countries produced about 98% of the world’s rough diamonds in 2025. Australia was not one of them, though it led the world in volume in the 1990s. The Argyle mine in Western Australia closed in November 2020 after 37 years, and the country has produced no diamonds since. Canada lost two of its three remaining mines during 2026.
Where a diamond comes from is the first fact about it, and it becomes harder to recover at every step between the mine and a finished ring.
Where Diamonds Are Mined
Russia produced the most rough diamonds in 2025 by volume and by value, 31.5 million carats worth $2.72 billion, close to a third of world output on either measure. Botswana came second on both, at 15.5 million carats and $1.98 billion. Angola, Canada, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia account for nearly all of the remainder.
Carats and dollars draw different maps. Namibia mined 2.1 million carats in 2025 and earned $721 million, averaging $344 per carat. Those stones came from the seabed off the Atlantic coast after a journey down the Orange River that breaks up fractured rough along the way. The Democratic Republic of Congo mined more than four times Namibia’s volume and earned $45 million, averaging $5 per carat. The world average was $93.
Those two averages describe two different industries. Botswana’s production comes from open pits run by Debswana, a 50/50 joint venture between De Beers and the government of Botswana, of which Jwaneng is the largest. Congolese production comes largely from alluvial deposits worked by hand, by diggers with shovels and sieves along riverbanks and in pits dug into old river terraces.
Nobody publishes a reliable count of how many people dig for diamonds this way. The figure in circulation, somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million across roughly 20 countries, traces back to advocacy material with no published methodology. The production records show the imbalance from the other side. Countries whose recorded output is almost entirely artisanal came to about 10% of world volume in 2025 and 1.3% of world value.
Canada’s position changed fast. Rio Tinto’s Diavik mine delivered its final production on 26 March 2026, after 23 years and more than 150 million carats. Ekati, operated under Burgundy Diamond Mines, entered court protection in May 2026. Its sale process closed with no qualifying bid, the mine went into receivership on 14 July, and production stopped in mid-August. That leaves Gahcho Kué, a joint venture between De Beers and Mountain Province Diamonds, as the only Canadian diamond mine in production at the end of 2026.
Participating governments report all these production figures to the Kimberley Process, which does not audit them.
The Step That Makes a Stone Hard to Trace
Rough diamonds from several mines and several countries are blended together into consistent assortments before they are sold. The trade calls this aggregation. De Beers describes its own version as blending like-for-like types of diamonds regardless of which of its four producing countries they came out of, those being Botswana, Canada, Namibia, and South Africa. A buyer who orders a box of a given size and quality receives comparable goods every time. A mine having a bad quarter does not disrupt anyone’s supply.
For years, the most that Tracr, De Beers’ own tracking platform, could report was “DTC” origin. That meant the stone came from one of those four countries, with no way to say which. In October 2024, De Beers announced that new scanning technology and algorithmic matching let Tracr “digitally disaggregate” diamonds to confirm a specific country. The service covers rough above 1 carat, roughly half a carat once polished. Everything smaller is still sold blended.
Cutting removes what is left of the trail. India processes close to nine in ten of the world’s diamonds, most of that work in Surat, and its share climbs as the stones get smaller. India accounts for about 92% of the world’s cut and polished diamonds counted by number of stones. Counted by value, the figure is about 60%. A well-formed gem crystal yields roughly 40% of its weight as finished stones, and small near-gem rough yields 15% to 23%. A sawable crystal is sawn in two before polishing, so one identifiable piece of rough becomes two gems, each graded and sold separately.
Laboratory examination of the polished stone does not recover it either. GIA researchers reviewed the published methods in 2022 and found no study using any method that demonstrated unique, measurable characteristics that would allow independent provenance determination of a random individual diamond. Trace elements do not separate deposits by geography, and two diamonds from different mines can be indistinguishable while two from one mine differ markedly.
Colored stones are a different case. GIA does determine geographic origin for ruby, sapphire, emerald, alexandrite, Paraíba-type tourmaline, and red spinel. Those crystallize in the crust, where varied local conditions leave a readable chemical signature. Diamonds form about 150 kilometers down, under conditions broadly alike beneath every ancient continent, and they are close to pure carbon, which excludes nearly everything that would mark one deposit off from another.
Melee, which GIA defines as stones under a fifth of a carat, never enters the question. It is sold in parcels that can contain hundreds of stones, sized by sieve. Grading costs more than the stones are worth, so melee goes ungraded, and no tracing program reaches it.
What the Kimberley Process Covers
The Kimberley Process began as a meeting of southern African producing states in Kimberley, South Africa, in May 2000. The certification scheme was signed by 37 countries at Interlaken in November 2002. It came into force the following year, and participants may trade rough diamonds only with other participants.
Its definition of a conflict diamond covers rough diamonds used by rebel movements or their allies to finance conflict aimed at undermining legitimate governments. That wording comes from United Nations Security Council resolutions and has not changed since 2003. It excludes violence by a government or its own security forces. Participants have been working on a revised definition that would take in state actors. At the plenary in November 2025, they did not reach agreement on which ones to include.
A Kimberley Process certificate accompanies a shipment of rough diamonds, sealed in a tamper-proof container, moving between two participant countries. It is not issued for an individual stone, and by the scheme’s own rules, polished diamonds do not require one at all. The scheme also does not certify jewelers. No Kimberley Process document travels with a finished ring.
Regulation has moved against the practice. From March 2025, the European Union stopped accepting “mixed origin” on a Kimberley Process certificate for rough above half a carat, and a certificate must now name every country in the parcel. The rule reaches mining companies that aggregate their own production, which the regulation says in as many words.
The system runs on paperwork. The Kimberley Process describes itself as relying on administrative controls to track stones from mine to export and through later trading, and it notes that researchers have reached no consensus on any analytical method for identifying where an individual stone came from.
The scheme operates through each participant’s national legislation, which gives a certificate legal force at a border. It is not a treaty and not an international organization. A permanent secretariat opened in Gaborone in 2024, after two decades with no standing office and no permanent staff.
The Records That Follow a Single Stone
Origin can be established for an individual diamond, and the method is always the same. The mine records where the stone was recovered, and that information stays with it through every transfer afterward. Everything rests on that record, so a program of this kind is only as good as its first entry and the custody chain behind it.
GIA’s Diamond Origin Report begins before the diamond is cut. Rough arrives at the laboratory in sealed parcels, accompanied by the Kimberley Process certificate and the mining company's invoice. GIA measures and photographs the rough, and when the polished stone comes back for grading, it matches the two using physical measurements and other scientific data. The science establishes that this polished stone came from that piece of rough. The country printed on the report comes from the mining company's paperwork.
That sequence cannot be run backward. A diamond already cut and in a retail case cannot acquire an origin report, because the rough it came from was never analyzed.
Tracr, De Beers' blockchain platform, registers rough at the point of recovery. More than 5 million stones are on it, which De Beers puts at around two-thirds of its own rough production by value. Since January 2025, it has recorded a single country of origin for De Beers rough above 1 carat, and GIA bought a 30% stake in the platform in 2026. ORIGIN by De Beers, relaunched in November 2025, inscribes polished stones of 0.3 carats and up, confirming that the diamond is natural and was recovered by De Beers in Botswana, Canada, Namibia, or South Africa.
Each of these programs covers only part of the market. Tracr and ORIGIN apply to diamonds that came through De Beers. A GIA origin report exists only where someone submitted the rough before it was cut. A stone that reached the case by any other route arrives without an origin history.
Stones under half a carat are outside the rules entirely, including all melee.
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Lab-Grown Diamonds and the Limits of “Sustainable”
The Federal Trade Commission wrote to eight jewelry companies in April 2019 about their advertising. Several had described their products as eco-friendly, eco-conscious, or sustainable. The Commission told them not to use those terms without qualification, because no company was likely to substantiate every reasonable interpretation. Three of the eight sold lab-grown diamonds and five sold simulants.
The standard behind that position is the Commission’s Green Guides, which ask that a general environmental benefit claim be qualified and supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence. The Commission last revised the Guides in 2012. It reopened them for review in December 2022 and has not issued a new edition.
For diamonds, the underlying evidence is thin in a particular way. The comparative studies in circulation were commissioned by parties with a stake in the answer, and they point in opposite directions. One widely quoted analysis of lab-grown energy use came from a firm that was at the time also a paid consultant to a lab-grown industry association. It rested on data from a single producer and was withdrawn after a trade publication examined it.
The mechanism is not in dispute, even where the figures are contested. Growing a diamond consumes a fixed amount of energy for a given process, so its carbon footprint depends on the electricity running the reactor. Production is concentrated in countries where coal supplies much of the grid. A producer buying renewable power and a producer on a coal-heavy grid can make the identical stone on identical equipment, with footprints an order of magnitude apart.
The label names a category of stone, and the category does not say which grid the reactor was on.
A Stone That Is Already Out of the Ground
Every route so far leads back to a mine. A diamond that came out of the ground decades ago and has been in a setting ever since is outside all of it.
Inherited jewelry is the obvious case. The secondary market is the other, where estate pieces and loose stones recovered from older jewelry are traded and resold. Buying either one adds no new extraction. That is the whole of the claim being made for them.
The diamond in an inherited ring was mined under whatever conditions prevailed when and where it came out. A sale now does not revise that history, and it does not add to it either.
The stone is then usually reset, since an old setting is one reason a diamond stays unworn. GOODSTONE runs an heirloom redesign service built around a stone the client already owns, working from photographs and a rendering that is approved before anything is made.
An older stone may have no grading report at all, or one written to conventions that have since changed. The origin report described earlier cannot be obtained for it at any price. The rough was never analyzed.
What to Ask a Jeweler
The phrase a jeweler is most likely to use is conflict-free, and it has a specific mechanism behind it. The World Diamond Council introduced the System of Warranties in 2002 as a framework for industry self-regulation. It requires buyers and sellers to put a warranty statement on their invoices each time diamonds change hands, covering rough and polished stones as well as finished jewelry. The statement declares that the diamonds came from legitimate sources not involved in funding conflict, and that the seller guarantees they are conflict-free.
A company joins by completing an online self-assessment questionnaire, after which it receives an identification number to display alongside the statement. The warranty applies to business-to-business invoices, so retail customers never see it. The guarantee itself reaches back to the Kimberley Process certificate that covered the rough.
A smaller set of documents can be checked independently.
- A GIA report number is laser-inscribed on the girdle and can be looked up for free on GIA’s Report Check, confirming that the document belongs to that stone.
- A GIA Diamond Origin Report names a country of mining origin. A jeweler either has one for a given stone or cannot obtain one, since the rough had to be analyzed before cutting.
- An ORIGIN by De Beers inscription appears on some polished stones of 0.3 carats and up. It reached North American retail in late 2025 through a small number of partners.
- A written sourcing policy, which the Kimberley Process itself suggests asking to see.
For a stone under half a carat, or any diamond already cut and in a case with no origin analysis behind it, no document in the trade can name its country of origin. A jeweler who says so is describing the system accurately.