In an attempt to retain wealth from mining, Brazilian legislators have proposed the creation of a new state-owned critical minerals firm which would be responsible for developing the country’s vast reserves of rare earth minerals in partnership with foreign investors.
The initiative comes as the US mounts pressure to mine for Brazil’s critical minerals and secure access to supplies outside of Chinese control. But as the US government pushes for new investments, Brazil has struggled to work out how to take full advantage of its minerals, many of which are needed for green technologies.
In late March, Brazilian president Lula da Silva told the Africa-Latin America summit in Colombia that critical minerals are an opportunity for both continents to reject “being mere minerals exporters” and instead “produce nationally to develop our countries”.
In a series of bills introduced last week in the Brazilian Congress, pro-Lula lawmakers proposed the creation of a state agency called Terrabras, which would develop the country’s critical minerals. This is one of at least 13 bills seeking to regulate the sector, Brazilian officials said.
Brazil holds the world’s second-largest reserve – after China – of rare earths, a group of 17 elements such as neodymium and terbium which are key to producing electric vehicles (EVs) and the magnets used in wind turbines. But the country currently produces and refines less than 1% of the world’s rare earths, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Mine to industrialise
Leonardo Durans, senior director at Brazil’s industry ministry, told a press briefing on Tuesday that the debate on how to manage the country’s critical minerals is “absolutely strategic”.
While rare earths are typically scattered and difficult to extract, Brazil’s deposits are found in ionic clay, which is more concentrated and cheaper to produce.
Durans said that Brazil has exported its minerals and imported manufactured technology like EV batteries, magnets and solar panels. “We want to break this logic definitively,” he said. “The directive is not to mine just for the sake of it anymore. We are going to mine to industrialise the country.”
At a global level, as the energy transition boosts demand for minerals, more developing countries are taking steps to reap the benefits from mining. At least 13 African countries have ordered export bans on raw minerals, seeking to create jobs and tax revenues by refining them domestically.
But, as Brazil’s Congress and regulators debate how to benefit from mining deals, the US government has ramped up pressures for mineral supplies. At a major forum hosted by the US government in São Paulo in March, officials said they have interest in at least 50 critical minerals projects – a category which includes rare earths – in Brazil worth billions of dollars.
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Earlier in February, the US government gave a $565-million loan to Serra Verde, the company developing the Pela Ema ionic clay mine in the state of Goiás – which claims to be the only large-scale, heavy rare earths producer outside Asia. The deal includes an option for the US to acquire a minority stake in the company.
Meanwhile, Brazil’s rare earths exports to China boomed in 2025, according to the Brazil-China Business Council, as Chinese investors also race to secure supplies.
Durans said Brazil’s historical policy is to “be friends with all countries from every bloc”, and added that the country will not take a side with the US or China.
“We want to receive this capital that wants to invest in the country but with the counterproposal of joint technological development, so we can have a win-win between Brazil and the US, with the EU or with China,” Durans told journalists.
Critical minerals policy still unclear
Rodrigo Rollemberg, one of Terrabras’ proponents, told Congress that there’s a “race for our rare earths and for our critical minerals” but that “it is very important that we have a public company taking care of these resources”.
Rollemberg’s bill argues it “aims to position Brazil as an active player in the international geopolitics of critical minerals”, while also adding value to the minerals sector, industrialising the country and strengthening its “technological security”.
Mauro Sousa, general director of the National Mining Agency (ANM) and one of the country’s mining regulators, said that the government is currently working on a national policy for critical minerals, which is expected to be published in two to three months.
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One of the gaps at the moment is demand from inside Brazil for the manufacture of magnets, Sousa said, which would take time to build. He added that, while the country should start building its own internal supply chain, “we cannot give a 10, 15 or even 30-year leap that China has already made in a short time”.
Durans said the legislative proposal to create a state firm was “surprising”, as it did not arise from the federal government and was not previously consulted. He added that the government’s focus is on a policy that includes a roadmap for developing domestic supply chains, and requires foreign investors to add domestic value.
Mining industry “concerned”
The Brazilian Mining Institute (IBRAM), composed of mining companies representing 85% of Brazil’s production, expressed concerns over the Terrabras proposal, and argued in a statement that a new agency would not solve the challenges keeping the country from developing its vast rare earths reserves.
IBRAM argued that Brazil, which derives about 4% of its GDP from mining, already has regulatory agencies that have been underfunded for years. They argued that the country instead lacks industrial-scale refining technology, struggles with insufficient funding, “precarious logistical infrastructure” and a scarce workforce.
“None of these obstacles are eliminated by the creation of a public company,” IBRAM said in the statement.
Instead, IBRAM favoured a different bill introduced in Congress towards the end of 2025, which, it said, offers legal certainty, domestic processing, and incentives – “exactly what the sector needs to convert reserves into production”.
The post As US and China seek rare earths, Brazilian lawmakers push for state-owned developer appeared first on Climate Home News.
As US and China seek rare earths, Brazilian lawmakers push for state-owned developer
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
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To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
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New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
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Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
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