The social and environmental complexities of extracting energy transition metals

Abstract

Environmental, social and governance pressures should feature in future scenario planning about the transition to a low carbon future. As low-carbon energy technologies advance, markets are driving demand for energy transition metals. Increased extraction rates will augment the stress placed on people and the environment in extractive locations. To quantify this stress, we develop a set of global composite environmental, social and governance indicators, and examine mining projects across 20 metal commodities to identify the co-occurrence of environmental, social and governance risk factors. Our findings show that 84% of platinum resources and 70% of cobalt resources are located in high-risk contexts. Reflecting heightened demand, major metals like iron and copper are set to disturb more land. Jurisdictions extracting energy transition metals in low-risk contexts are positioned to develop and maintain safeguards against mining-related social and environmental risk factors.

Challenging the Need for Deep Seabed Mining From the Perspective of Metal Demand, Biodiversity, Ecosystems Services, and Benefit Sharing

“…The move towards a low-carbon economy is projected to lead to increased demand for minerals including cobalt, lithium, nickel, copper, vanadium and indium for use in electric vehicles (EVs), green energy technologies and storage batteries, with large increases in demand predicted for cobalt, nickel and lithium (Teske, 2019;World Economic Forum, 2019;Hund et al, 2020). Interest in mining virgin resources from the deep sea has, in part, been driven by such projections, alongside desires to maintain a diversity of supply and concerns about environmental and human rights impacts associated with terrestrial mining (Church and Crawford, 2020;Lèbre et al, 2020;Paulikas et al, 2020b).…”

Reduced Use of Fossil Fuels can Reduce Supply of Critical Resources

“…The size of future stocks and flows are uncertain and have been disputed for long due to diverging assumptions on, e.g. (Northey et al 2017;Odell et al 2018) and increased risk of social instability due to environmental degradation (Lebre et al 2020). This study has identified a new source of uncertainty, namely how mitigating climate change can reduce the use of host resources and thereby reduce primary supply of by-products.…”

Metals of a Changing World: Better Understanding the Metals Life-Cycles through a Holistic Approach

“…They propose a multi-criteria classification of all risks to systematically incorporate them into risk and impact assessments at the scale of the mining territory. The authors recommend a detailed preliminary analysis of mining projects up to their technical and operational characteristics, taken as decisive factors that will influence the nature and intensity of the potential impacts at various scales, and thus help make decisions at the territorial level, [36] also advocate for a broader Copyright © Michel Cathelineau AMMS.MS.ID.000625.5 (5).2020 vision to be integrated into future scenario planning about the transition to a low carbon future, by systematically considering in risk quantification, the environmental, social and governance (ESG) pressures surrounding the point of extraction (i. e. mining territories at large). The study presents a global assessment of ESG complexities associated with the extraction of Energy Transition Metals (ETM).…”