Mountain guide Eduardo Mostazo was born and raised in Cáceres, a small city in southwest Spain close to Portugal, which has suffered a rural exodus. Now it faces a new threat: a proposed lithium mine which Mostazo and other local activists fear could contaminate water sources and the nearby mountain, threatening birds such as the endangered Spanish imperial eagle.
Their struggle to protect the pristine environment highlights a growing challenge for Europe, as the continent races to start extracting and producing minerals like lithium that are critical to the clean energy transition, instead of relying on imports from China and other emerging economies.
Yet, while bureaucrats in European capitals are under pressure to secure supplies on their soil, communities where the resources are located question whether they will benefit from their exploitation.
They told Climate Home they need more information before agreeing to host mining projects on which they feel they have not been adequately consulted, and want stronger guarantees that the rush for minerals won’t harm the nature on which local livelihoods depend.
Explainer: Why the world is racing to mine critical minerals
In Cáceres, mining company Extremadura New Energies (ENE) – a subsidiary of Australian Infinity Lithium – has promised to create 1,500 jobs during the mine’s construction and 700 jobs during 26 years of operation.
Nonetheless, locals worry that a mine could damage today’s economic mainstays of tourism and agriculture. “There is no talk of alternatives,” said Mostazo. “When a proposal comes from a big company with lots of millions, there’s the impression that the politicians don’t really investigate [the impacts], they go blind with the promise.”
Breaking Europe’s mineral dependence
As part of its efforts to boost clean energy and electrification, the European Commission wants to shrink its dependence on Chinese-produced minerals by ensuring that at least 10% of critical raw materials such as lithium, copper and nickel are extracted within Europe by 2030.
The International Energy Agency estimates that global demand for lithium – a key component in electric car batteries – could increase by up to 42 times by 2040 from 2020 levels. Currently, the EU imports four-fifths of its extracted lithium and 100% of its processed lithium.
Santos Barrios, professor of crystallography and mineralogy at the University of Salamanca, said Europe’s mineral dependency “is a very big problem” because those materials come from countries that often lack social and environmental protection.
“They import it from other places where it is much cheaper to extract it than here, but at the cost of losing many things along the way,” he explained. The ideal situation, he added, would be to no longer rely “on countries that are not completely transparent, such as China”.
To speed up progress ahead of its 2030 deadline, in March the European Commission approved 47 strategic mining projects, which will benefit from fast-tracked permitting processes and easier access to EU funding.
Spain and Finland are the EU countries with the most strategic projects involving extraction or integrated extraction and processing of critical raw materials, with five projects each.
ENE applied but was not selected due to delays in the permitting process, with its request for a licence still sitting with the regional government, which has requested the company to submit more detailed information on the project.
Requests for project documents denied
Only 40 kilometres north, in Cañaveral, meanwhile, many locals were disappointed to learn that a nearby mining project led by the company Lithium Iberia had made the list.
A citizens’ group opposing the mine – worried about the potential impact on water sources and nature – is preparing a letter to the president of the European Parliament asking for access to the project documentation, including its environmental impact assessment and the methodology used to evaluate applications.
The European Commission has previously denied such requests, citing it as sensitive business information, said Julio César Pintos Cubo from the green group Ecologistas en Acción.
Others, such as Friends of the Earth Europe, have also argued that the strategic projects under the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act erode transparency and have failed to engage civil society, as neither the Commission nor EU member states have granted access to the documents submitted by the applicants.
“EU law must not be weakened to benefit poorly regulated companies – something that is unfortunately common in the mining sector – while the administration abandons transparency, water and environmental regulations, aligning itself with the mining lobby,” said Pintos.
A Commission spokesperson told Climate Home the strategic minerals projects had been assessed by independent experts, who were asked to evaluate – among other criteria – whether they can be “implemented sustainably”.
Lack of “democratic accountability” threatens success
Experts are warning that limited transparency and local participation in selection of the EU’s strategic projects could have negative impacts on their implementation.
“There will be opposition because the European Union is taking these decisions in Brussels following an accelerated procedure for new projects. There has been no deep consultation and there is a lot of pressure to achieve these objectives,” said Marco Siddi, a researcher with the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.
The absence of “democratic accountability” around these high-stakes mining projects could provoke a social reaction similar to that of the yellow vests, Siddi warned, referring to the unrest that erupted in France in 2018 after the government tried to hike fuel prices as a green measure.
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The Commission spokesperson told Climate Home that each country’s authorities have the main responsibility for implementing these strategic projects, including carrying out consultations with local people “in accordance with national rules”.
Barrios, the researcher, said all opinions should be considered and environmental damage minimised, “but the last word has to be left to qualified personnel”.
The Extremadura government in Spain did not respond to a request for comment on whether and how communities had been consulted on the strategic project in Cañaveral.
Earlier Raquel Pastor, the region’s director general for industry, energy and mining, told Climate Home News that “projects of any kind that generate employment, wealth, and development in the region are welcomed, as long as they comply with all regulations, including environmental ones, of course, and with the law.”
Businesses aim to do no harm
The mining companies, for their part, have promised in most cases to minimise the impact of their operations on nature and contribute positively to rural development.
ENE’s CEO Ramón Jiménez Serrano told Climate Home that the Cáceres mine – which also plans to host a nearby processing plant – would only use treated wastewater and therefore would not impact local water supplies. Despite this, the company’s application for a permit with the local water authority was denied.
According to Steve Emerman, an independent geophysics and mining expert who has testified before the European Parliament on the issue, “there is no precedent for any modern, industrial mine that has been operated and closed without environmental contamination”.
On a cold and windy January afternoon, 150 kilometres north of Cáceres, 100 people from nearby villages – including the local priest – packed into the cultural centre in Ciudad Rodrigo, a town in the region of Salamanca, for a session on the impact of another proposed lithium mining project in the area.
This project, led by another Australian mining company, Energy Transitions Minerals, is still in its early stages, and is not on the EU’s list of strategic projects. But there is growing concern about how it could affect the region’s landscape and traditional jobs. According to the company, Salamanca is the European region with the highest concentration of critical raw materials, including lithium, copper and tantalum.
Increasingly, foreign-owned companies want to jump on Europe’s critical minerals bandwagon. Many are so-called junior mining companies that lack the financial and technical capacity to actually extract the materials from the ground, explained Emerman. “They just want to get the permit, then they will sell it to someone who can carry out the project,” he said.
Doubts over corporate sustainability plans
Locals fear this could be the case in Bosnia and Herzegovina, an EU candidate country where the lithium rush has reached the small northeastern town of Lopare. In 2023, the Swiss-owned junior mining company ARCORE AG announced it had struck “gold” in the densely forested area of rolling hills and rich lithium deposits, and is currently awaiting approval of a concession agreement from the Republika Srpska authorities, one of the country’s two governing units.
Environmental lawyer and activist Azra Berbić thinks it likely that another company with more resources and funding will purchase that agreement and carry out the lithium mining. ”We’ve seen this story before. This is why the local communities are so worried… they fear the agreement will be sold to a company like Rio Tinto,” she said.
So far the British-Australian conglomerate, one of the world’s largest mining companies, has shown no formal interest in Lopare. But Rio Tinto has faced a backlash over its environmental and labour practices around the world, including in neighbouring Serbia where its $2.4 billion investment in a proposed lithium mine in Jadar ignited mass protests in 2024.
Announcing that project in 2021, the company said it aimed to minimise the impact on communities by building the Jadar mine “to the highest environmental standards”, including dry stacking of tailings so they can be reclaimed without a dam and treating water so that 70% comes from recycled sources.
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In the case of Spain’s Cáceres, ENE has said it will use 100% renewable energy for its operations, although CEO Jiménez admitted that not all the above-ground machinery needed can yet run on electricity.
And in Salamanca, the regional government’s spokesman for energy transition minerals, Jorge Gil Mediavilla, told Climate Home that “although less money will be earned, the company has agreed to renounce open-cast mining in order to carry out small, highly concentrated underground mining operations”.
Yet, some experts are sceptical about the viability of the Salamanca project. “I doubt that it could be profitable,” said Antonio Areas, a veteran mining entrepreneur from the area, while geologist Antonio Aretxabala noted it would be the first underground lithium mine in the world.
Ángel Sánchez Corral, spokesman for local anti-mining platform El Rebollar Vivo in Salamanca, said many local communities remain unconvinced by the EU’s push for homegrown production of critical minerals and politicians’ promises of economic growth and jobs.
“The declaration of strategic projects by the EU is a step backwards in terms of environmental protection and social and territorial rights for the benefit of extractive and speculative companies – it makes us lose confidence in the EU institutions,” he said.
Reporting for this article was supported by the Magmatic School of Environmental Journalism.
The post Europe’s lithium rush leaves mineral-rich communities in the dark appeared first on Climate Home News.
Europe’s lithium rush leaves mineral-rich communities in the dark
The launch of the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) has been put back yet again, raising doubts about the institution’s future ability to finance fossil fuel projects – its main objective – as global lenders retreat from such investments over climate concerns, experts told Climate Home News.
The bank, which had been billed to launch in September after a series of delays, is now scheduled to begin operations in November, according to the head of the African Energy Chamber, an advocacy body for the continent’s oil and gas sector.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at around 125 billion barrels of crude and over 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to boost economic development.
As a group, Africa sided with a number of powerful oil-and-gas producing nations in blocking progress on negotiations to craft a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at last year’s UN COP30 climate talks, although some countries did individually support the proposal.
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Meanwhile, major projects under development across the continent – including the 1,443-km East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and Dangote’s 700,000-barrel-per-day Kenyan refinery – show that African governments see oil and gas as playing a significant role in meeting their energy and economic needs for many years to come.
In 2022, at a gathering of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) in oil-rich Angola, ministers from its member states adopted a resolution to create the Africa Energy Bank to finance projects for the production, use and trade of oil, gas and broader energy sources.
African control over energy resources
An article on the APPO website explains that the bank was conceived as a way to overcome “disenchantment” with fossil fuels among “the international community” which it said had crystallised around the “energy transition” concept.
“If Western countries, after having long taken advantage of the energy sources they now revile to develop, can afford the luxury of abandoning them, this is not the case in Africa,” it adds, noting that many of the continent’s economies are still largely dependent on oil and gas revenues.
A separate web page about the bank, also hosted on APPO’s website, says its objectives include financing the exploration, production and refining of oil and gas, as well as supporting member states in transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources “while ensuring energy security”.
Said Addi, a former executive with Shell and energy commodities trading house Gunvor, said the new bank was judged necessary because financing for hydrocarbons from many traditional international lenders has become constrained.
In trying to fill this financing gap, Africa is not simply setting up another fund to support oil and gas, he added. “It is also an attempt to give African countries greater control over how their energy resources and infrastructure are financed,” he explained.
Nigeria to host the AEB
The energy bank – a joint initiative of APPO and the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) – has so far suffered several delays and is almost two years behind schedule. The initial plan was to start operations in January 2025, with Nigeria as the host country, but the bank’s opening was delayed to June of that year to allow Nigeria time to finalise the construction of the bank’s headquarters in Abuja.
After the government announced the completion of the offices in late November 2025, a new launch date was set for January 2026, which was moved back to April, June and then September. Now it has shifted again to November, raising concerns that the institution may be losing momentum.
Former Shell executive Addi said that if the capital is eventually paid in, the bank becomes operational and its first projects are commercially credible, then the delays will be regarded as normal teething troubles in setting up a multilateral institution. But, he added, scepticism will be justified if it continues to stall.
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Baron Lamarré, an oil and gas expert and former Petronas oil trader, said that missing “three deadlines in a row is not normal”, and warned that if the timeline slips again, “the story flips from ‘ambitious institution finding its footing’ to ‘good idea that lost momentum before it found any’.”
The Nigerian government, APPO and Afreximbank did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
The funding challenge
The Africa Energy Bank is targeting base capital of $5 billion, with plans to scale up to $120 billion within five years by mobilising private-sector funds. However, it is expected to start operations with initial seed capital of $500 million.
The funding plan is to have the 18 member countries of the APPO contribute $83 million each to the bank as equity for a combined $1.5 billion. Afreximbank, other non-APPO African countries and investors outside the continent are expected to provide the remaining $3.5 billion.
But even the initial $500 million has not been easy to mobilise. In May, APPO Secretary-General Farid Ghezali called on members to deliver on their pledges towards the startup goal before the end of June. But the delays suggest this may not have been met, with experts saying Africa may be finding it difficult to self-fund its oil and gas projects in the absence of international capital.
Lamarré said every extension of the deadline points to the fact that “raising fossil fuel capital in Africa without the majors and their financing networks is brutally hard”.
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Since 2020, Western lenders, export credit agencies and insurers have been in steady retreat from African hydrocarbons, he said, while oil majors are divesting their African assets, handing over fields to smaller local operators whose credit ratings are not high enough to borrow cheaply.
Even capital from China and the Gulf, which has partially filled the gap, cannot match the volume, tenor or pricing that Western investors once offered, Lamarré argued.
“If mobilising the first $500 million of seed capital [for the AEB] has taken this long, that’s the clearest signal yet of how steep the climb to $120 billion looks,” he said, noting that the continent’s energy financing gap is as large as $30 billion-$45 billion per year.
Africa’s investment landscape, meanwhile, has been shifting. While foreign direct investment dropped from a 2024 peak, inflows remained roughly one-third above the continent’s long-term average in 2025, according to the 2026 World Investment Report from UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They are concentrated in a few sectors including critical minerals needed for renewable energy technologies, battery manufacturing and advanced industrial production.
At the same time, data on global energy investment from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that fossil fuel investment in Africa has declined over the last decade.
“Trojan horse” for fossil fuels
While the Africa Energy Bank struggles to get off the ground, climate campaigners have criticised its primary aim of financing oil and gas on the continent at a time when the world is starting to move away from high-carbon fuels to cleaner alternatives.
Bhekumuzi Dean Bhebhe, founder of Africa Change Lab, described the bank as a “Trojan horse”, arguing that its focus on fossil fuel financing runs counter to the global energy transition and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 goals of sustainable development and inclusive growth.
The energy bank, he warned, “risks locking Africa into a new cycle of debt, dependency and fossil fuel entrenchment”, adding that its financing blueprint does not pave the way for a climate-resilient future. “In truth, it is to deepen the same extractive, carbon-heavy pathways that the continent should be moving away from,” he added.
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Kenya-based climate and energy expert Joab Okanda said the AEB’s plan to finance oil and gas is “a misplaced priority” and it should instead back clean energy in line with the policies of some of Africa’s major export markets like Europe.
In addition, the new bank could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale oil and gas projects, he added, noting that its proposed $5-billion initial capital is equivalent to the cost of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline alone.
The AEB’s aim of backing more fossil fuels should be flipped “to support countries that are oil-dependent to start working on their transition plans”, Okanda said.
The post Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes
A booklet published by the UK’s opposition Conservative party includes a “cost of net-zero” that appears to have been doubled by a spreadsheet error.
The “common sense” policy document argues that “what people ultimately want is a government competent enough to solve the problems for which it takes responsibility”.
In a section that says “sophisticat[ed]…modelling” should not be a substitute for “political judgement”, the “Right Way” document disparages various estimates of the cost of net-zero.
The Conservative document then claims – incorrectly – that the government’s official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), had put the cost of net-zero at close to £1tn. It says:
“In 2020, the CCC estimated that its route to net-zero would cost £957bn.”
In fact, the CCC’s 2020 estimate was exactly half this amount – £478bn – and last year it published a revised figure of £108bn, largely as a result of the falling cost of electric vehicles (EVs).
Spreadsheet error
The Conservative party’s erroneous claim appears to stem from another report that had accidentally added up numbers twice, using a spreadsheet published by the CCC in 2020.
The 2020 spreadsheet contains a table listing the additional investments that would be needed to build a net-zero economy, from low-carbon electricity generation through to heat pumps and EVs.
These extra capital expenditures, listed as “CAPEX”, add up to a total of £1.38tn over the 30 years of 2020-50. They are set against operational savings, listed as “OPEX”, of £0.90tn.
Added up over 2020-50, the combined CAPEX and OPEX figures come to a total of £478bn.
In addition to the annual sectoral CAPEX and OPEX figures, the CCC’s 2020 spreadsheet also has a line giving combined totals for each year. It appears that someone has added all of these numbers together, resulting in the savings and costs being counted twice.
This double-counted total for the cost of net-zero amounts to £957bn – as shown in the image below – and it appears to be the source of the claim in the Conservative booklet.
At the time of publication in 2020, the CCC said that the £478bn net cost of net-zero amounted to less than 1% of GDP over 30 years – and that the large investment needed would not only result in savings due to lower fossil-fuel imports, but that it would boost GDP overall, by around 2%.
In 2025, the CCC revised its estimates for investment costs and operating savings to £670bn and £562bn respectively, giving a net total of £108bn over 2025-50, or less than 0.2% of GDP.
Earlier this year, the committee said that cutting emissions to net-zero would cost less than a single fossil-fuel price shock and that doing so would have benefits worth £110bn per year.
Paper trail
The erroneous claim in the Conservative document is referenced to the CCC’s 2020 advice on the UK’s sixth “carbon budget”, which, as explained, does not contain the £957bn figure.
The earliest online use of the £957bn figure found by Carbon Brief is a 12 January 2026 article in the Spectator, by retired engineer and self-described “accidental energy analyst” David Turver.
A day later, Turver repeated the mistaken number in a report for the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs. His report cites figure 5.3 of the CCC’s 2020 advice.
However, as set out above, the CCC spreadsheet containing the data for figure 5.3 only adds up to £478bn, half the figure claimed by Turver.
It appears that Turver accidentally added up all of the numbers in the CCC spreadsheet, without noting that it already included a line for the annual total. This results in double-counting the cost.
(Turver’s report also triggered a slew of inaccurate headlines stating that net-zero would cost £7.6tn – or even £9tn. These figures, which came from Turver’s report, were based, among other things, on the implicit assumption that fossil fuels and the cars, boilers and power plants that use them are all free.)
After Turver’s report and article in January 2026, the erroneous £957bn figure was repeated in March by the Great British Think Tank. The organisation has the tagline “data, not vibes” and says of its work: “Every figure [is] sourced from official public bodies.”
The £957bn figure then appeared in the Conservative “Right Way” document in October 2026.
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