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.
The accounting differences that decide whether your nature investment shows up in inventory, in BVCM, or nowhere at all.
The question reaches a procurement team about three weeks before the next sustainability committee meeting. Someone has read about insetting. Someone else has just signed off on an offset purchase. The CSO wants to know if the two are interchangeable. The answer is no, and the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard is the reason why.
This article walks through what each term means at audit-grade specificity, what the standards actually say about how each gets counted, and how to decide which tool fits which target. The insetting vs offsetting question is one of the most-searched in corporate climate strategy, and one of the most poorly answered. By the end of this piece, you should be able to brief a committee on the difference without notes.
The two definitions, in plain English
Offsetting means buying carbon credits generated outside your value chain and retiring them against your residual emissions. The reduction happens somewhere else, financed by you, and the credit is the receipt.
Insetting means investing in emission reductions or removals inside your own value chain, typically with suppliers, where the reduction is directly linked to the products and services you buy. The reduction happens inside the boundary of your Scope 3 inventory, and the accounting treatment is fundamentally different.
The shorthand from the University of Oxford’s Nature-based Insetting Initiative is useful: insetting is what you do with the supply chain you have; offsetting is what you do with the supply chain you do not have.
What the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard actually says
The GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard, finalised in 2024 after a multi-year pilot, sets the rules for how land-based emission reductions and removals enter corporate inventories. The Standard distinguishes between inventory accounting (Scope 1, 2, and 3) and project or intervention accounting (a separate methodology for crediting).
For insetting, the practical implication is that supplier-level interventions, when properly measured and attributed, can reduce your Scope 3 category 1 (purchased goods and services) emissions in your inventory. The reduction is not a credit retired against the inventory; it is a lower inventory number, period.
For offsetting, the credit is retired separately. It can be reported as a contribution toward a net-zero claim under the SBTi Beyond Value Chain Mitigation framework or as part of a VCMI Carbon Integrity claim, but it does not lower the inventory number.
A practical consequence: if your Science Based Target requires a 50% absolute reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030, insetting moves you toward the target. Offsetting does not. This single point of difference reshapes the procurement decision.
When insetting counts toward Scope 3 (and when it does not)
Insetting counts toward Scope 3 only when several conditions are met:
- The intervention must occur with an entity in your value chain.
- The emissions reduction or removal must be measured against a defensible baseline.
- The reduction must be attributed to your share of that supplier’s output, not double-counted with other buyers.
- It must follow the inventory accounting rules in the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard, not the project accounting rules used to generate credits.
The most common failure mode is double counting. If your supplier sells the same reduction as a credit on the voluntary market and also reports it to you as a Scope 3 reduction, the math breaks. The Standard requires you to address this risk, typically by purchasing and retiring the supplier-issued credit as part of your inventory or by contractual provisions that prevent the supplier from selling the reduction twice.
When insetting does not count toward Scope 3: when the intervention sits with a supplier you do not buy from, when the baseline is not defensible, when the attribution is unclear, or when the documentation does not survive audit. Those cases default to Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, which is still useful but operates on a different ledger.
The procurement and supplier engagement question
Insetting is harder than offsetting. That is the unfashionable truth most buyers eventually confront. Offsetting is a transaction; insetting is a relationship.
To run an insetting program, you need supplier mapping precise enough to know which farms or facilities sit at which Scope 3 boundary. You need an engagement model that gets suppliers to participate, which usually requires multi-year commitments and shared economics. You need an MRV architecture that measures the right things and produces audit-ready documentation. And you need a contractual structure that prevents double counting and protects both sides.
The trade-off you receive in return is significant. Reductions count against your inventory rather than your residual. Supplier relationships deepen, which protects sourcing continuity. Yield and quality improvements often follow regenerative interventions, which reduces your input cost over time. And the regulatory file, under CSRD, CSDDD, EUDR, and the SBTi FLAG Guidance, is materially stronger.
Choosing the right tool for the right target
A practical decision rule. If your target is a science-based Scope 3 reduction and you operate in a FLAG sector or source FLAG commodities, insetting is the structurally correct tool. If your target is a net-zero claim that includes neutralising hard-to-abate residual emissions outside your value chain, BVCM via high-integrity offsets is the structurally correct tool. Most companies with material Scope 3 exposure need both, in different proportions, sequenced over time.
The sequencing matters. Insetting takes longer to stand up but produces a permanent reduction in the inventory. Offsetting can be transacted faster but does not change the inventory and now sits under tighter claim restrictions. Treat them as complementary tools with different jobs, not as substitutes. The Accountability Framework Initiative and the IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions both provide useful guardrails for the insetting side, with biodiversity, human rights, and benefit-sharing requirements that go beyond carbon math.
If you are mapping a Scope 3 reduction roadmap and need to scope which interventions count toward your inventory versus which sit in Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you structure a nature-based supply chain investment program that fits your FLAG exposure, your target architecture, and your audit horizon. Schedule a consultation.
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