To help meet the needs of the energy transition, global demand for copper – a mineral critical for making electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels – is set to rise more than 40% by 2040, fuelling concern over the risks its extraction poses to the environment and human rights, new data shows.
In its latest Global Trade Update, UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) projected this week that 80 new copper mines and $250 billion in investment would be required by 2030 to meet demand and avoid a looming shortfall that could stall the world’s shift to clean energy and digital infrastructure.
The report called copper the “new strategic raw material” for the green and digital economy – and a test case for how global trade systems handle resource pressures under strain.
“Copper is no longer just a commodity – it’s a strategic asset,” Luz María de la Mora, director of UNCTAD’s Division on International Trade and Commodities, said in a statement.
“Its market exposes the power asymmetries that still shape global trade. That’s why we need to invest in local value addition, scale up recycling and remove trade barriers that limit opportunity.”
A separate new study, meanwhile, has warned that ramping up copper production could come at a human and environmental cost.
In its Transition Minerals Tracker published on Wednesday, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), a global research and advocacy group, singled out copper as associated with 513 allegations of human rights abuses recorded between 2010 and 2024, accounting for about 60% of a total of 835 cases linked to the mining of transition minerals.
The tracker monitors abuses associated with the extraction of eight key transition minerals – copper, bauxite, cobalt, lithium, manganese, nickel, zinc and iron ore.
These minerals, used to produce technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles, have become more sought after in the global push towards clean energy and electrification.
But Caroline Avan, head of just transition and natural resources at BHRRC, warned that the urgency of the energy transition should not be used to “justify an unprincipled scramble for transition minerals” that is driving widespread human rights abuses, environmental destruction and growing community conflict.
A transition built on exploitative minerals supply chains “is not simply unjust – it is unstable, unpredictable, and ultimately unsustainable”, she said, adding that “the path to net zero cannot be paved with more injustice and global inequality”.
Hidden cost of copper extraction
With copper reserves concentrated in five countries – Chile, Peru, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Australia and Russia – the researchers found that the highest number of allegations in the 15-year period occurred in three of those countries, including 14% of the total in Peru, 11% in Chile and 10% in the DRC.
In 2024 alone, more than half of the 156 abuse allegations linked to minerals projects and mines were associated with copper extraction, which over the years has faced significant operational threats as a result of conflicts with communities and associated legal challenges, the researchers said.
Central and South America featured as hotspots for copper-related legal cases. The researchers also found that 52% of copper mines located in high water stress areas had impacts on water access and/or pollution.
Ending poverty and gangs: How Zambia seeks to cash in on the global drive for EVs
This year, four copper mining companies operating in Zambia, including one British and three Chinese firms, have been accused of releasing toxic mining waste into the Kafue River’s watershed in one of the country’s worst environmental disasters.
The most devastating spill occurred in February, when the tailings dam holding mining waste from Chinese company Sino-Metals Leach Zambia burst its walls and released acidic effluent into the river.
The pollution killed fish, burned maize and groundnut crops and led to the deaths of livestock, wiping out livelihoods and causing the water supply to the nearby town of Kitwe to be shut down.
Indigenous peoples on the frontline
The alleged abuses in BHRRC’s Transition Minerals Tracker usually affect individuals and families living near mining sites and their environment, with three in five involving local communities and another 77 infringing on Indigenous Peoples’ rights, including violation of their right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) about projects.
Edson Krenak, Brazil cultural survival lead, wrote in a forward to the research: “Rushing to extract more minerals without reducing consumption or showing true respect for our rights is not only reckless – it is unjust and unfair,” adding that the world must listen more to Indigenous voices.
In her contribution, Annabella Rosemberg, senior advisor on just transition with Climate Action Network (CAN) International, called for “a rights-based approach throughout renewable energy value chains, where all human rights are respected, where workers are treated fairly – and where the opportunities of this extraordinary and unprecedented global effort are harnessed to build shared prosperity”.
Mining firms lack human rights policies
The researchers found that just 20 companies have been associated with 60% of allegations and attacks since 2010, with the top five companies for 2024 listed as Georgian American Alloys, China Minmetals, Codelco, Grupo México and Sinomine Resource Group.
Additionally, the tracker documented 157 attacks against human rights and environmental defenders, accounting for one in five of the total abuse allegations recorded.
Despite the problems recorded, less than half of all mines associated with at least one allegation in the tracker are covered by a corporate human rights policy. And fewer than 30 mines are associated with 50% of allegations, demonstrating that while human rights issues are widespread in the sector, some mines have become a focus for allegations of abuses and conflict.
Rosemberg of CAN International wrote in the report that the enormous impacts of “unchecked mining” on the world’s most marginalised groups – already disproportionately affected by climate change – should not be left out of climate conversations.
“Conversely, we need to be clear that extracting more minerals, at all costs, and without a serious look at reducing energy and material demand, notably in the richest countries, will not answer the climate crisis nor the hopes of economic prosperity in resource-rich countries,” she added.
The post Rising copper demand fuels concern over pollution and rights abuses appeared first on Climate Home News.
Rising copper demand fuels concern over pollution and rights abuses
When carbon dioxide (CO2) is released from a factory or power plant, the gas can be captured and permanently stored underground, preventing it from driving climate change.
This is the idea underpinning carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is at the heart of many nations’ net-zero plans.
Influential organisations, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), describe CCS as “critical” for cutting emissions from key sectors – and for helping to avoid dangerous global warming.
In particular, capturing CO2 is seen as one of the only viable options for decarbonising some of the world’s highest-emitting industries, such as cement production.
The UK, for example, has committed to investing as much as £21.7bn over the coming decades in its nascent CCS industry, as part of the nation’s net-zero strategy.
Yet, in the UK and elsewhere, there has been a backlash against plans for CCS.
Citing high costs, ties to the fossil-fuel industry and a “history of poor performance”, critics describe CCS as a “dangerous distraction” or a “false climate solution”.
Time and again, the outlook for the roll-out of CCS has been scaled back, as the technology has failed to deliver as quickly as expected – and as policy support has wavered.
Furthermore, critics state that the technology remains “unproven” on the scale required to make a meaningful impact on global emissions.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explores the role CCS is expected to play in achieving net-zero, its record to date and the reasons it has been criticised, using the UK as an example.
What is CCS?
CCS involves capturing CO2 emissions released from a large source, such as a gas power plant or a cement factory.
The CO2 is separated from the facility’s exhaust stream, generally using a chemical solvent, before being compressed into a liquid and transported via pipeline or vehicle. The CO2 is then stored by injecting it into underground reservoirs, such as depleted oil fields or saline aquifers.
The term “CCUS” is sometimes also used, referring to the “utilisation” of CO2 to make products, including fertilisers, fuels or building materials. Such uses do not necessarily lead to permanent emissions cuts, as the CO2 can end up later being released back into the atmosphere.
(“CCS” is used in this Q&A, unless quoting another organisation that specifically refers to “CCUS”.)
The infographic below shows the stages of capturing CO2 and transporting it to be either stored or used in other applications.
Carbon capture technology was originally rolled out at US and Canadian oil wells in the early 1970s as a way to achieve “enhanced oil recovery”. This involves injecting captured CO2 into depleted wells – a process that stores CO2, but also helps to extract more oil.
This remains, by far, the most significant end use for captured CO2 worldwide, with around three-quarters of it used for this purpose.
Moreover, most of the CO2 currently captured is a by-product of gas purification – the process by which fossil fuels such as methane are separated from other, unwanted substances. Selling this CO2 can make such gas projects more economically viable.
Therefore, as shown in the chart below, which is based on International Energy Agency (IEA) data, the majority of CO2 that is both captured and used today helps the fossil-fuel industry to extract and sell more oil and gas.
CCS was first proposed as a way to deal with CO2 emissions in a 1976 academic article, which imagined injecting the captured gas into the ocean.
It is only since the early 2000s that CCS has gained traction as a proposed climate solution, with a 2005 “special report” by the IPCC exploring the topic. At that time, the authors note there were just three small-scale projects trying to capture and permanently store CO2.
Installing CCS at factories or power plants and permanently storing the CO2 would mean that, in theory, such facilities could continue using fossil fuels without contributing to climate change.
Such applications are often mentioned alongside two related technologies, both of which could be used to “suck” CO2 out of the atmosphere and, thus, deliver “negative emissions”.
One is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Crops absorb CO2 as they grow and BECCS involves a power plant burning these crops, then storing the resulting CO2.
The other technology is direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS).
These technologies are classed as “CO2 removal”, as they involve absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere using plants or machines and then storing it permanently.
By contrast, CCS installed at a factory is considered a way to avoid CO2 emitted by that specific facility from entering the atmosphere. This Q&A focuses on such applications, which account for the vast majority of existing and planned CCS.
How much CCS capacity has been built so far?
As of February 2026, there were a total of 75 operational CCS projects around the world. As noted above, almost all of them are at fossil-fuel extraction and processing sites, according to the IEA’s database.
Together, these projects capture 62.5m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) each year. This is equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Ecuador.
(This compares with the 22 CCS projects, promising to capture 40MtCO2 annually, that were operational or under construction as of 2014.)
As the chart below shows, the amount of CO2 currently being captured and stored is a tiny fraction of the total emissions from fossil-fuel use.
In a 2020 report, the IEA explained that the “story of CCUS has largely been one of unmet expectations: its potential to mitigate climate change has been recognised for decades, but deployment has been slow”.
A wave of interest in CCS in the 2000s, largely from countries in Europe and North America, focused on enabling coal power plants to continue operating with lower emissions.
This interest largely petered out, as plummeting renewable energy costs weakened the case for coal plants with CCS. Today, there are only seven operating CCS-coal plants worldwide – five in China, one in the US and one in Canada.
Yet the Paris Agreement in 2015 – and the national net-zero targets that followed – highlighted the need for deep emissions cuts in sectors that previously expected to continue emitting for decades. This, once again, has fuelled interest in the use of CCS.
In recent years, there has also been growing interest in producing low-carbon “blue” hydrogen from gas with CCS.
Hydrogen is widely seen as key for decarbonising certain sectors – particularly in industry – but analyses suggest that it may be difficult to make sufficient “green” hydrogen using renewable power on the timescales required.
As the map below shows, most CCS capacity is based in the US and Canada, with other major fossil-fuel producers such as Norway, Brazil and the Gulf states also contributing.
A surge of projects have entered the global CCS pipeline in recent years. According to the IEA, 93.7MtCO2 of capture or storage capacity is under construction as of February 2026 and another 1,279.6MtCO2 is in the “planning” stages.
“Planned” projects include any initiative at early concept, feasibility or engineering study stages and the industry has a long history of projects being cancelled or delayed.
Nevertheless, this pipeline of projects could lead to a large expansion of facilities dedicated to permanent CO2 storage that does not involve extracting more oil.
The planned projects – if they are realised – would also include significant growth in sectors where CCS is virtually non-existent, such as steel, hydrogen and cement production, as shown in the chart below.
What role is CCS expected to play in reaching net-zero?
It will be impossible to stop dangerous climate change unless the world reaches net-zero emissions, according to the IPCC. The amount of global warming – and whether the Paris Agreement temperature target can be met – depends on when net-zero is reached.
Many global pathways that have been set out for achieving net-zero, including a majority of the IPCC-assessed pathways where global warming is limited to 1.5C, rely on the use of CCS at fossil-fuel plants and industrial sites.
“These models have been quite instrumental in bringing CCS back onto the agenda,” Lina Lefstad, an ecological economist at Lund University, tells Carbon Brief.
Influential organisations relying on CCS in their net-zero scenarios range from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) through to the oil company Shell. The IEA has stated that net-zero would be “virtually impossible” without CCS.
These scenarios often include 10s to 100s of times more CCS capacity being built in the coming decades. The IEA includes 1.7GtCO2 being captured by 2035 in its net-zero scenario – nearly 30 times more than is captured today.
(Some of the much higher numbers in scenarios assessed by the IPCC have been dismissed by experts as implausible, especially given the slow rollout of CCS to date.)
When considering CCS for both emissions cuts and removals, Dr Jennifer Roberts, a researcher at the University of Strathclyde and deputy director at the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Research Centre (UKCCSRC), tells Carbon Brief the situation is clear:
“From an IPCC climate modelling perspective…reaching net-zero without CCS is far more expensive, disruptive and potentially out of reach.”
This does not mean that it would be impossible to reach net-zero without using CCS. However, net-zero scenarios that use little or no CCS rely on dramatic changes elsewhere, such as much lower global energy demand.
Net-zero scenarios often include a crucial role for CCS in “hard-to-abate” sectors, referring to activities that lack available, low-cost options to fully decarbonise. In particular, CCS is widely seen as vital for decarbonising parts of heavy industry.
The IPCC sixth assessment report (AR6) summary for policymakers calls CCS a “critical mitigation option” for some sectors, including cement and chemicals. The technical summary of the AR6 Working Group III report says that “CCS will be required to mitigate remaining CO2” in industrial sectors.
The IEA describes CCS as “virtually the only technology” that can significantly cut cement emissions, which account for around 7% of the global total. (Much of this CO2 comes from chemical processes, meaning it would still be released if the industry was electrified.)
Yet, the understanding of “hard-to-abate” emissions is changing, as alternatives to CCS become cheaper and increasingly available. As a result, CCS has become a less attractive option in some sectors, as well as being seen as less vital in some others.
Carbon Brief analysis shows that the IEA has reduced its outlook for CCS in the power sector by a third, compared to its expectations in 2