Rapidly scaling up renewable energy to limit future warming requires a sharp increase in the supply of critical minerals like cobalt, nickel and lithium for technologies including solar panels, battery storage and electric vehicles. Yet sourcing these minerals often comes at a steep cost for both the environment and local communities.
Now, a coalition of U.N. scientists is proposing a new way forward: a global minerals trust.
“We need to replace today’s fractured, competitive, and extractive model with one rooted in transparency, justice, and long-term resilience,” Kaveh Madani, a professor with the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health and a co-author of the proposal and accompanying policy brief, said in a press release.
Broadly, a global minerals trust would treat critical green energy minerals as shared global assets “for the fair use of beneficiaries who might otherwise feel compelled to compete over them,” the scientists write in an article published in Science.
Countries would retain sovereignty and ownership of their resources, but the trust would coordinate trade to ensure a stable supply and adherence to environmental and social standards.
“This is potentially a win-win outcome because you’re reducing the environmental harm and you’re allowing for more cooperation and less conflict moving forward by having such a mechanism,” Saleem Ali, study lead author with the University of Delaware, U.S., and a member of the U.N. Environment Programme’s International Resource Panel, told Mongabay in a video call.
He said a trust could also stabilize mineral supply to manage volatilities and facilitate a circular economy by including provisions to recycle and lease metals as needed.
Many resource-rich countries, particularly in Africa, have historically been burdened with conflict and environmental damage from mining but with little compensation to show for it. Advocates for a minerals trust say it could provide a greater level of accountability and compliance standards to protect affected communities and “help bolster the prosperity of nations and people in these regions,” Stephen Northey with the Institute for Sustainable Futures in Australia, who did not work on the report, told Mongabay by email.
Emmanuel Kayembe, a professor of international relations at the University of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), raised concerns that in unstable, resource-rich countries like the DRC where armed groups control minerals, local people will still not see benefits. “As long as you have a government that struggles to manage its entire territory, what you’re presenting is more like a declaration of faith than a practical solution,” he said.
The paper and policy brief were published in advance of the upcoming G7 meeting in Canada. As chair of the meeting, Canada has a “strategic opportunity to facilitate early-stage consensus around the Trust,” the policy brief notes.
Banner image: A cobalt mine in Central Africa. Image by Fairphone via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Dider Makal contributed to the reporting of this article.
