Resource-rich African nations risk missing out on the investment needed to extract and refine their mineral wealth into high-value products for the clean energy transition because they lack accurate information on what they have, experts are warning.
African countries have attracted huge interest as the world scrambles to access the minerals and metals needed for the energy transition and digital and military technologies, with investors from the US, China, the United Arab Emirates and Europe jostling to secure access to the continent’s resources.
But any knowledge of Africa’s mineral wealth is, at best, an estimate based on century-old-mapping and haphazard geological data, policy experts and investors told Climate Home News.
The United Nations says Africa is home to 30% of the world’s mineral reserves, including cobalt, copper, lithium and manganese, which are needed to manufacture batteries and other clean energy technologies.
But experts like Bright Simons, who tracks natural resource spending in Africa for the Ghana-based IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, said the 30% number is not backed by any “empirical, evidence-based assessment” of the continent’s mineral wealth. While some analysts like Simons think the figure could be an overestimate, others argue it is likely an underestimate of the continent’s mineral reserves.
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Up-to-date and accurate data is critical for governments to negotiate better deals with prospecting mining companies and to help drive investment in mineral extraction and processing facilities that can add value to the continent’s resources.
But the lack of good mapping has negatively impacted the continent’s efforts to capture the economic benefits of booming mineral demand and to create jobs by extracting and processing raw materials into higher-value products before export, experts said.
Colonial maps
Under-exploration and scant information about Africa’s resources have made it challenging for states to attract investment and develop their resources, said Pritish Behuria, a political economist at the Global Development Institute at the UK’s University of Manchester.
“In many cases, former colonial powers retain more current knowledge of the kinds of mineral deposits that exist in African countries – and often, this has proven difficult to access for African governments,” he told Climate Home News.
Thabit Jacob, a researcher of extractive and energy resources at Roskilde University in Denmark, said many African countries “still rely on colonial maps”.
“There’s a growing realisation that Africa must know its true value in mineral richness and investment in geological mapping is crucial,” he added.
Mapping inequality
However, mapping investment is falling short. Africa’s share of global exploration investment has fallen in the last two decades, data shows.
In 2024 alone, both Canada and Australia received significantly more investment in geological mapping than the whole of Africa, even though the continent’s landmass is three times the size of the two countries combined, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Even in South Africa, a major mining destination, only 12% of the country has been mapped at a detailed level “which compares poorly with other popular mining destinations such as Canada and Australia where there is near complete coverage at similar scales”, explained Tania Marshall, of the Geological Society of South Africa.
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To address the dearth in data, multinational institutions like the World Bank have provided African countries with finance for mapping, but have simultaneously encouraged them to liberalise and privatise their mining industries.
As a result, international investors prioritising project development have come to dominate the continent’s mining sector, crowding out state-sponsored initiatives with stronger incentives to invest in data-gathering, researchers have found.
Digging blind
Orina Chang, an investor leading geological mapping across Somaliland, which has reserves of copper and zinc ore, said she was surprised to find out that even countries attracting huge interest from institutional miners, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), do not have systematic up-to-date mapping.
Instead, mining firms rely on artisanal mining and surface signs, like exposed ores on the ground – and crossing their fingers, she told Climate Home News.
The mapping deficit means there is little certainty on the size and quality of mineral deposits and provides few incentives for miners to invest in processing plants, Chang explained.
“Without mapping, everyone is blindly digging and you just get people who are not interested in really investing in your country,” she said. “With mapping, you’re able to attract much better players and build plants, create jobs, drive economic growth, help the GDP.”
The rise of AI-driven exploration tools
Today, AI-driven mapping tools have created new opportunities to obtain high-precision information with less on-the-ground investment. Geophysical data and satellite imagery are fed into a model that creates a geological map which can help point to high-potential deposits.
Last year, California-based KoBold Metals, which is backed by US billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, discovered a massive copper deposit in Zambia using AI-driven exploration. In July, the firm signed an agreement with the DRC to lead critical mineral exploration there.
But the technology is expensive and not widely available to governments.
Instead, in its 2024 Green Minerals Strategy, the African Union called for some of the revenues from mineral rents to be reinvested into mapping using low-cost techniques such as satellite imagery and drones, which are less precise.
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The case for co-operation
For Gerald Arhin, a research fellow at University College London, greater regional collaboration and pooling resources could also help reduce the costs of mapping for individual governments. Last year, for example, South Africa signed an agreement with South Sudan to co-operate on mineral exploration.
“The sharing of data, industrial intelligence and technical expertise across borders could be transformative for African countries, as well as for developing countries in other regions,” Clovis Freire, who heads the Extractive Commodities Section at UN Trade and Development (Unctad), told Climate Home News.
Mapping, however, is only one element of a complicated equation when it comes to developing minerals for the energy transition, said Eszter Szedlacsek, who researches climate justice in the context of the green transition at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
“In the race for Africa’s critical minerals, deals hinge only partly on where resources are found, and more on geopolitics, investment conditions and longstanding trade ties,” she said.
The post Outdated geological data limits Africa’s push to benefit from its mineral wealth appeared first on Climate Home News.
Outdated geological data limits Africa’s push to benefit from its mineral wealth
Governments need to start addressing climate change impacts and nature loss as a threat to national security and manage shocks before they hit rather than picking up the pieces afterwards, Britain’s foreign minister and other leaders told the opening of Climate Week NYC on Monday.
Ed Miliband – who was until July the UK’s energy minister – said the growing urgency and severity of extreme weather and related disasters require a shift in thinking, calling on governments to put the issues “front and centre”.
“Climate breakdown, in my view, must be an issue for foreign ministers and prime ministers, as well as energy and climate ministers – the security community, not just the activist community, the generals, not just the green campaigner,” he told an audience of policy and business leaders.
There is a need to assess risk differently, he added, by embedding climate and nature in national security systems, threat assessments and contingency planning. He also urged countries to pool information because climate shocks can travel fast through supply chains as well as influencing financial markets and migration patterns.
The framing of climate change as a threat to countries’ security and stability is not new, but it has gained greater emphasis as the impacts of global warming are biting harder in places like Europe, which is struggling with more intense heatwaves, drought and forest fires.
In mid-August, Miliband said in a social media post, reflecting on the UK’s hot and dry summer, that he would convene foreign ministers attending the UN General Assembly in late September to discuss how to respond to “this new national security threat” and build a coalition for action. But he did not give further details of that initiative on Monday.
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Australia calls for unified response
Other leaders in New York also reflected on the growing threat to their societies and economies from climate change impacts and exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his country “understands the dangers of global warming and the urgency of climate action as well as any nation”.
“We have seen it up close – from increasingly intense bushfires and floods, to the damage warming oceans are wreaking on our vulnerable coastlines,” he said in a speech, adding that with a record-breaking El Nino forecast, Australia and Pacific nations are preparing for a potential summer of extreme heat, bushfires and floods.
With scientific forecasts of worsening impacts now coming to pass, “this means the global community cannot afford to be frozen in time as the world warms around us”, he added. People cannot be left to cope alone, he said, emphasising that as leaders, “we need to come together, to meet the problem head on”.
Australia will lead the negotiations at the upcoming COP31 climate summit, and has brought the existential threat to Pacific countries from sea level rise into the diplomatic limelight. The pre-COP gathering next month will be hosted in Fiji, with a visit by leaders to Tuvalu.
Speaking to Climate Home News in New York, Panama’s environment minister Juan Carlos Navarro said the small Central American country faces hundreds of millions of dollars in losses from drought in the Panama Canal due to El Niño.
The Panama Canal Authority estimates income could be reduced by between $225 million and $400 million due to slower maritime traffic passing through the strait.
“What a great irony,” Navarro said. “Panama being a small, carbon-negative country pays the price for the big carbon-emitting countries.”
Climate investment “critical” to stability
Amina J. Mohammed, deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, said there was a need for countries to stick with multilateral approaches to problems including climate change, despite the difficult geopolitical times the world is going through. She added, however, that it “does require your voices. It won’t happen by itself. We have to lean into it.”
The rest of the high-level UNGA week in New York will show the extent to which multilateral efforts to resolve the world’s problems – from climate change to poverty – have top-level support as leaders give their speeches, including the Brazilian and US presidents on Tuesday.
Kaysie Brown, associate director for climate diplomacy and geopolitics with think-tank E3G, said the statements by Miliband and other leaders at Climate Week NYC had underlined the political and government case to integrate climate considerations into security thinking and institutions at the highest level.
“In a world of escalating climate impacts and the record El Niño expected to heighten risks worldwide alongside energy volatility and geopolitical tensions, investing in global climate resilience and the clean energy transition are critical to credible strategies to enhance stability and national security,” she added in a statement.
Suneeta Kaimal from the Natural Resource Governance Initiative (NRGI) said that, while in previous years governments heavily focused their speeches on climate action, this year’s focus on energy security does not change the underlying challenge.
“The fact that the framing has changed from energy transition to energy security doesn’t change the reality that this transition needs to occur in energy systems. It’s just a different framework. It’s a more transactional framework, but it all points to the need for resilience,” she said.
Speaking at the opening session of Climate Week, Iceland’s Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir described how her country had reacted to the spiralling costs it faced from the 1970s oil price crisis by investing in a large-scale district heating system fuelled instead by its abundant geothermal energy.
“Resilience wasn’t built while the crisis was happening. It was built in the years after – deliberately, patiently, as a national mission – so that the next shock wouldn’t hit as hard, if at all,” she said.
New COP goal on electrification
Speaking at a separate event on Monday, UN climate chief Simon Stiell pointed to a new voluntary target expected to be adopted at COP31 for 35% of global energy use to come from electricity by 2035 as a strategy that can help cushion countries, families and businesses from fossil fuel supply shocks and rising costs.
At the United Nations, the Turkish COP presidency gave more details of the electrification goal it first announced at the Bonn climate talks in June, including sharing with governments a final text of the pledge it wants them to get behind.
The pledge sets out a global ambition to advance electrification, highlighting the importance of supporting developing countries to identify their grid investment needs and access finance for electrification.
“It is a development strategy, an industrial strategy, a health strategy, and a security strategy,” Stiell said.
The post Climate change and energy transition rise up national security agenda appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate change and energy transition rise up national security agenda
Climate Change
Albanese’s NY Climate Week address acknowledges scale of the climate challenge, but fossil fuels notably absent
SYDNEY, Tuesday 22 September 2026 — In response to Prime Minister Albanese’s keynote address at New York Climate Week, Dr Simon Bradshaw, COP31 Lead and climate expert at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“It is encouraging to see Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledging the immediate and profound climate threat to communities in the Pacific, Australia and worldwide, and the need to work together, with bravery and compassion. Now we must match those words with real action to phase out fossil fuels.
“Earlier this month in Palau, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese committed Australia to helping accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and defend the crucial goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C — a survival line for Pacific island countries and all those paying the cost of our fossil fuel addiction through worsening floods, fires, drought and sea level rise.
“However, Australia continues to undermine its aspirations for global climate leadership by expanding fossil fuel production. The Albanese Government has approved an astonishing 37 new, extended or expanded coal and gas projects since first elected. Every one of which compounds the threats to our shared security and wellbeing. Remarkably, in his major climate speech in New York overnight, the Prime Minister failed to even mention fossil fuels.
“As our Minister for Climate Change Chris Bowen has said, we are in a global fossil fuel crisis. Getting off fossil fuels through transitioning to renewable energy is the quickest pathway to greater security, stability and affordability for all. But right now Australia is throwing more fuel on the fire.
“We are now near certain to overshoot 1.5°C of warming. For the Pacific and Australia alike, this will be measured in more communities torn from their land and homes, and the loss of more people and places we love. There is a path back below 1.5°C of warming, and every fraction of a degree matters, but it will demand all minds and all hearts working together.
Australia fought hard for the privilege to chair the next round of global climate negotiations. The world is crying out for a clear vision and leadership from Australia as we head towards COP31 in Antalya.
“Australia must lead by example at home through an immediate end to new fossil fuel approvals, including rejecting Woodside’s mammoth Browse project. And must ensure that COP31 boosts our shared security by accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels. Get this right, and Australia will emerge as a responsible middle power and force for good in troubled times.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on 0406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
This year’s so-called “super El Niño” is entering into record-breaking territory.
Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific now equal the previous daily record set in 2015 and will likely keep rising in the days ahead.
El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon in the Pacific that reshapes weather patterns around the world and temporarily boosts global temperatures.
The current El Niño event – which has been underway since June and is expected to last until next year – has been developing faster than any previous event on record.
The strength of an event is tracked using the “Niño 3.4 anomaly”, which measures how much warmer sea surface temperatures in a section of the central Pacific are than average.
As of 19 September, the daily anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region stands at 3.07C, putting it in a statistical tie with the previous record of 3.08C.
Some scientists, using a different baseline for calculating the anomaly, have already called the new record.
Either way, this is remarkable, in part because of how early in the calendar year it is occurring. El Niño typically peaks in the winter months, most commonly in November or December.
Every strong El Niño on record has continued to strengthen after mid-September – and there is every reason to think that this one will as well.
(For more on El Niño, see Carbon Brief’s recent interactive explainer.)
Record territory
El Niño events are typically classed as “weak” when the Niño 3.4 anomaly reaches 0.5C, “moderate” above 1C, “strong” above 1.5C and “very strong” above 2.0C.
For this year’s event, the Niño 3.4 anomaly has now reached 3.07C, which puts it in a statistical tie with the record set on 18 November 2015, set during a “very strong” El Nino event.
The chart below shows how the strength of the current El Niño (red line) is dramatically outpacing both 2015-16 (blue) and another “very strong” event in 1997-98 (light blue).
To analyse the developing El Niño, Carbon Brief followed the convention of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Oceanic Niño index (ONI).
ONI is calculated by subtracting the latest 30-year average temperature in the Nino 3.4 region from daily sea surface temperatures. This approach allows for the most recent years to be compared against the most recent 30-year period. It removes much of the influence of longer-term, human-driven warming from the index.
(While meteorological organisations typically track changes to ONI on a three-month rolling average basis, Carbon Brief’s analysis looked at how the metric is changing on a daily basis.)
If ONI is calculated using a baseline of 1991-2020 then the current El Niño has already set a new record.
Since the start of June, El Niño’s strength has been greater than any other year. In early September in both 1997 and 2015, anomalies were around 1.9C – more than one degree below where they are this year.
An alternative index
There is another commonly used metric – the relative Oceanic Niño index (RONI) – used to study El Niño.
Introduced by NOAA in 2024, the RONI index adjusts for tropical ocean warming linked to human-caused climate change. To do this, it takes sea surface averages in the Nino 3.4 region and subtracts out temperature anomalies observed across the tropical oceans (between the latitudes of 20 degrees north and south).
This approach may better remove the influence of climate change in this specific region, but can also diminish the apparent strength of strong El Niño events, such as the current one, which extend well outside the Niño 3.4 region.
The chart below shows daily RONI values, which are record setting for this time of year, but remain below an all-time daily record set during the 1982-83 El Niño event.
RONI stood at around 2.5C in mid-September, some 0.7C below the 1982 record.
However, that record was set in late December, at the peak of the event.
The 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 events added between 0.5C and 1.9C to their RONI values between mid-September and their peaks.
On track to smash monthly and seasonal records
Because daily El Niño values are noisy, scientists typically turn to monthly or seasonal averages to compare El Niño events.
The latest full calendar month for which data is available – August 2026 – had a Niño 3.4 anomaly of around 2.45C. This is higher than the peak of every prior El Niño event on record except 2015-16 – where the anomaly reached 2.75C – and 1877-78, when the anomaly sat at around 2.7C, based on a reconstruction of sea surface temperatures using sparse ship data.
The figure below shows the monthly evolution of the five strongest El Niño events on record alongside 2026, as well the current forecast from 14 seasonal forecast models.
Taken together, the models project a peak monthly anomaly later this year of around 4.1C, with 80% of the 674 individual model runs falling between 3.4C and 4.6C.
Every single model run peaks above the 2015-16 record. The projected margin over that record, some 1.3C, is larger than the entire gap between the strongest and fifth-strongest El Niño of the past 150 years.
Some caution here is warranted, however. No seasonal forecast system has ever been verified against an event of this size, because none has ever occurred. The models also predicted temperatures slightly warmer than observed this summer, with real-world observations for August coming in around 0.3C below forecasts.
However, all strong El Niño events on record have continued to strengthen well into the winter – and the models are in near-unanimous agreement that this one will, too. If the forecast holds, the current event will peak between November and January at a level far beyond any event previously observed in the instrumental record.
El Nino’s effect on global temperatures typically lags rising ocean temperatures in the Pacific by several months, so most of the impact will be felt in 2027 rather than 2026.
Carbon Brief’s most recent “state of the climate” quarterly analysis found 2026 on track to be the warmest or second-warmest year on record. The next update in early October will examine what a record El Niño means for 2027.
The post Analysis: ‘Super El Niño’ reaches ‘remarkable’ all-time record appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: ‘Super El Niño’ reaches ‘remarkable’ all-time record
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