Canada is stepping up in the race for critical minerals. During its G7 Presidency, the country announced a $6.4 billion investment for 26 new projects and partnerships. This aims to strengthen supply chains and reduce reliance on unstable markets. The announcement took place at the G7 Energy and Environment Ministers’ Meeting in Toronto. It marks a new approach for Canada and its allies to ensure clean energy security, advanced manufacturing, and defense.
Canada’s Critical Minerals Alliance Gains Global Momentum
Central to this initiative is the Critical Minerals Production Alliance. This framework connects G7 nations and industry leaders to speed up mineral projects while maintaining strong environmental and labor standards.
Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Tim Hodgson noted that access to critical minerals—like lithium, graphite, nickel, and rare earth elements—supports cleaner, more resilient economies.
He said,
“Canada is moving quickly to secure the critical minerals that power our clean energy future, advanced manufacturing and national defence. Through the Critical Minerals Production Alliance and the G7 Critical Minerals Action Plan, we are mobilizing capital, forging international partnerships and using every tool at our disposal to build resilient, sustainable and secure supply chains. These investments are foundational to Canada’s sovereignty, competitiveness and leadership in the global economy.”
Unlocking $6.4 Billion for 26 Projects
Canada is introducing 26 new investments, partnerships, and policies. These initiatives aim to speed up the production and processing of critical minerals across the country. They will attract public and private capital to boost domestic mining and processing.
Key highlights include:
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Offtake agreements with major producers like Nouveau Monde Graphite and Rio Tinto for graphite and scandium.
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Partnerships with nine allied nations—France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Norway, the U.S., Australia, and Ukraine—to co-invest and secure offtake deals.
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A new Roadmap to Promote Standards-Based Markets for Critical Minerals under the G7 Critical Minerals Action Plan (CMAP).
These actions position Canada as a trusted and transparent supplier of responsibly sourced minerals, enhancing investor confidence in long-term, low-risk clean energy supply chains.
Building a Secure and Responsible Future
Canada’s ties with G7 partners focus on resilience. With rising global competition, clear supply chains are crucial for strategic security.
Under the G7 Critical Minerals Action Plan, member countries aim to diversify production, boost innovation, and ensure fair labor and environmental practices. This plan builds on Japan’s Five-Point Plan for Critical Minerals Security (2023) and Italy’s 2024 initiatives. It also expands cooperation with emerging markets and developing economies.
Canada will use the Defence Production Act to stockpile key minerals, enhancing domestic readiness for defense and industrial needs. This stockpile will:
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Strengthen Canada’s defense supply chains.
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Protect domestic production from market disruptions.
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Support NATO’s deterrence and defense strategy.
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Boost sovereignty in the Arctic region.
This strategy shows that minerals like nickel, copper, and rare earths are vital for EVs, batteries, national defense, clean technologies, and digital infrastructure.
Projects Driving Canada’s Mineral Future
The newly funded projects span Quebec and Ontario, targeting high-demand minerals for EV batteries, semiconductors, and renewable technologies.
Flagship projects include:
- Northern Graphite Corp. – Graphite mine near Montreal, Quebec.
- Nouveau Monde Graphite Inc. – Matawinie graphite project, Quebec.
- Vianode – Synthetic graphite and anode materials facility in St. Thomas, Ontario.
- Torngat Metals Ltd. – Strange Lake rare earth elements project, Quebec.
- Ucore Rare Metals Inc. – Rare earth processing plant in Kingston, Ontario.
- Rio Tinto Group – Scandium production facility in Sorel-Tracy, Quebec.
Additional infrastructure investments in Chibougamau, Kuujjuaq, and Eeyou Istchee James Bay (Quebec) will improve logistics and supply chains for copper, lithium, nickel, and cobalt.
These developments will boost local economies, create jobs, and strengthen G7 supply chain resilience while supporting Canada’s clean energy transition.
Mobilizing Global Capital for Clean Energy Security
G7 partners agree that responsible mining needs immediate, scaled investment to tackle issues like permitting delays and price volatility. The G7 Critical Minerals Action Plan calls for better collaboration among governments, export credit agencies, and development finance institutions (DFIs) to unlock capital and lower investment risks.
This strategy aims to attract private financing for projects meeting high environmental and ethical standards, fostering transparent, market-based systems for mineral trade.
Moreover, the G7 seeks to help emerging market economies build responsible mining industries through better infrastructure, governance, and investment frameworks.
These partnerships will align with global initiatives like the G20 Compact with Africa, ensuring mineral development fosters local value creation and community participation.
Strengthening Canada’s Leadership in a Critical Decade
Furthermore, Canada is preparing for major international events, including the IEA Ministerial Meeting and the PDAC Conference in 2026. These will highlight Canada’s growing role in achieving a clean energy future.
By linking national defense, economic security, and clean energy goals, the Critical Minerals Production Alliance shows how cooperation can counter practices that disrupt mineral trade and threaten global supply stability.
The country’s $9 billion defense investment plan, announced earlier this year, supports this strategy by enhancing domestic capabilities while promoting sustainable development.
Canada anchors North America’s critical minerals growth
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), North America holds a major share of the world’s essential mineral reserves. The United States has large deposits of lithium, copper, and rare earth elements. Canada is rich in graphite, lithium, and nickel, while Mexico has strong copper reserves.
Together, these countries play an important role in global mining. The region accounts for about 10% of the world’s copper output and 9% of rare earth production. In 2024, the United States approved its first lithium mine in more than 60 years, marking a big step toward securing a local supply.
By 2040, the IEA expects the value of North America’s energy minerals to grow to around USD 30 billion for mining and USD 14 billion for refining. Mining growth will mainly come from copper in the United States and Mexico, and from lithium and nickel in Canada.
For refining, the region could make up about 4% of the global market, led by copper and lithium refining in the United States and copper and nickel refining in Canada.
A Unified Path Toward Resilient Supply Chains
The G7 stands united against global challenges. Canada’s leadership shows that securing critical minerals goes beyond extraction. It emphasizes trust, transparency, and long-term sustainability.
By promoting responsible mining, mobilizing capital, and ensuring traceable supply chains, Canada and its allies are paving the way for a cleaner, more secure industrial future.
The Critical Minerals Production Alliance demonstrates that countries can work together. By collaborating, they build strong systems that support economic growth, protect the environment, and enhance national security. They also help power future technologies.
The post Canada Leads G7 with $6.4B Critical Minerals Boost to Secure Global Supply Chains appeared first on Carbon Credits.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
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