Delegates at last month’s U.N. climate change summit, or COP30, adopted a new mechanism to coordinate action on a just energy transition worldwide toward a low-carbon economy, away from fossil fuels. However, a proposal at the conference in Brazil to include language on critical minerals within the mechanism’s scope was scrapped at the last minute after China and Russia failed to support it.
Critical minerals like lithium, cobalt and nickel are crucial for renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles, but their mining and processing has been linked to negative environmental and social impacts.
An earlier draft text on the just energy transition included a paragraph recognizing “the social and environmental risks associated with scaling up supply chains for clean energy technologies, including risks arising from the extraction and processing of critical minerals.”
This is the first time that critical minerals were included in a text within climate negotiations under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Sources told Mongabay that Australia, the EU, the African Group of Negotiators, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and many Latin American countries supported the inclusion.
“In the second week, however, China made it clear that any inclusion of language about minerals governance was a red line, and thus ensured its exclusion even when many countries and large negotiating blocs had tabled language and argued in favor,” Emily Iona Stewart, head of transition minerals policy and EU relations at the NGO Global Witness, told Mongabay by email. “The text that was tabled in the first week did not make it into the final version of the just transition work program.”
Clement Sefa-Nyarko, a lecturer in security, development and leadership in Africa at King’s College London, told Mongabay by phone that this wasn’t the first time a mention of critical minerals has been severed from a U.N. conference. In 2015, when U.N. members adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a road map to tackle global challenges, critical minerals were excluded from the final text.
“This debate about where to place critical minerals is not a recent one,” Sefa-Nyarko said. “As far back as 2015, when the SDGs were being discussed, there was also controversy. That is repeating itself now at COP.”
Sefa-Nyarko said China or Russia were likely unsupportive of language on critical minerals because of the potential impact on their industries. China, in particular, is a global leader when it comes to processing and refining critical minerals. It processed 70-95% of the world’s lithium, cobalt, phosphate and graphite in 2024.
“That’s why it’s not surprising that China and Russia, which also have quite a good amount of those minerals, are the main ones opposing the inclusion of the language that will streamline mining to make how you mine more environmentally friendly,” Sefa-Nyarko said.
Banner image: The Quilapilún solar energy plant, a joint project by Chile and China in Colina, Chile. Image by AP Photo/Esteban Felix.
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