For the first time in UN climate negotiations, countries attending COP30 in Belém, Brazil, are grappling with the implications of extracting minerals required to manufacture batteries, solar panels and wind turbines.
On Friday, a draft text on ensuring that the transition to clean energy systems is just and sustainable – a negotiation stream known as the Just Transition Work Programme – recognised “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”.
It also “recalled” the principles and recommendations of a UN expert panel, which called on governments and industry to put human rights at the core of the minerals value chain, from mining to recycling. The UN panel report, published last year, set out key principles to ensure that mineral supply chains benefit countries and local communities endowed with resources, create jobs, diversify economies and generate revenue for development.
“For the first time, minerals are on the main stage of COP negotiations – no longer a side show,” said Melissa Marengo, a senior policy officer at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI).
Demand for metals such as copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel and graphite that are vital for manufacturing clean energy transition technologies is soaring. But extracting them creates both new economic opportunities, as well as social and environmental risks for resource-rich countries.
Around the world, increased mining activity has fuelled environmental destruction, deforestation and conflict with communities.
Last week, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told leaders gathered in Belém that it is “impossible to discuss the energy transition without talking about critical minerals, essential to make batteries, solar panels and energy systems”. Brazil has the world’s second-largest reserves of rare earths, which are used to manufacture permanent magnets for EV motors and wind turbines.
Developing countries have called for the impacts and opportunities of mining minerals for the energy transition to be included in the text. African countries, which hold more than 30% of the world’s critical mineral reserves, have been vocal on the issue. The African Group of Negotiators told COP30’s opening plenary that Africa’s resources “must translate into tangible benefits”.
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Earlier this week, the UK, backed by Australia and the European Union, proposed language on the importance of fair, transparent, traceable and environmentally sustainable mineral supply chains for the energy transition.
Campaigners widely welcomed the inclusion of minerals in the draft text as “a real first step”.
Marengo said the draft reflected many of the priorities voiced by producing countries, communities on the frontline of mining projects and Indigenous peoples across developing countries.
“But the real test begins now,” she said. “Parties must hold the line to secure strong social and environmental safeguards, fair value creation, and a genuinely just approach to transition minerals” that focus “on prosperity for producing countries and communities, and not only on supply security,” she added.
Currently the whole draft text on the Just Transition Work Programme is bracketed, meaning that none of it has yet been agreed.
The text notes that affected communities must be “central” to the design and implementation of climate measures and recognises the importance “of sustainable patterns of consumption and production”, including through circular economy approaches.
It also acknowledges “the importance of the rights of Indigenous Peoples” including self-determination and their right to free, prior and informed consent for development projects that affect them, in addition to “the specific rights and protections for Indigenous Peoples in voluntary isolation and initial contact”, which cannot give their consent to mining on their land.
More than half of energy transition mineral reserves are estimated to be located on or near Indigenous land.
“We are making history, as no previous COP decision has ever recognised the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact so clearly,” said Bryan Bixcul, global coordinator of the Securing Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in the Green Economy (SIRGE) coalition. “Any attempt by countries to remove or weaken this text would represent a major setback for the fulfillment of those rights,” he said.
SIRGE has called for the text to go further still and establish exclusion or “no-go” mining zones on the land of uncontacted Indigenous groups.
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Meanwhile, the inclusion of language on the “transition away from fossil fuels” remains deeply contentious, with references to fossil fuels only included as “options” in the text, meaning not everyone agrees to it being there. Saudi Arabia, large emerging economies such as India and China, and African countries opposed references to fossil fuels, according to observers present in the negotiating rooms.
To help deliver a just energy transition beyond COP30, the draft text includes a demand from an alliance of 134 developing countries – known as the G77 and China – to establish a mechanism that could act as a one-stop shop to provide countries with technical assistance and help foster international cooperation.
The idea has been resisted by developed countries, which argue that creating another institution would take a long time and risk duplicating the work of existing initiatives. Alternative options include “improving existing modalities”, “developing a policy tool box” and “developing guidance” to support countries deliver just transitions.
These alternatives amount to “tweaking”, Teresa Anderson of ActionAid International told reporters. “We know that if those modalities worked, we would not be in the crisis we are facing now.”
