As chair of the Group of 20 (G20) nations this year, South Africa wants to secure agreement for more local processing of the metals and minerals critical to the clean energy transition, with many mined in large quantities in the Global South – but it will first need to win support from dominant player China.
According to the G20 website, South Africa plans to work with other governments in the international economic forum “to ensure that the countries and local communities endowed with these resources are the ones to benefit the most” – especially as mineral extraction and refining accelerates to supply growing electrification and renewable power production worldwide.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said that countries rich in these minerals – which include lithium, cobalt, copper and nickel – should be the ones to gain most from their exploitation.
“Another of South Africa’s priorities for its G20 presidency is to harness critical minerals for inclusive growth and development,” Ramaphosa said, calling for a G20 framework on green industrialisation and investment aimed at delivering a grand bargain “that promotes value addition to critical minerals particularly close to the source of extraction”.
This, according to Ramaphosa, will result in “an additive rather than an extractive relationship” and reverse the historical trend by which resource-rich countries, many of them in Africa, lose out “because the benefit flows out of their own countries to other locals in the world”.
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Interest in processing minerals close to their source – known as “beneficiation” – has increased in recent years amid rising demand for the metals and minerals that are essential to produce clean technologies such as renewable energy infrastructure, electric vehicles and batteries.
Last December, during former US leader Joe Biden’s first and only visit to Africa, President Felix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) said, “it is imperative that the wealth contained in our [Africa’s] ground contribute directly to the well-being of our peoples”.
This view is in line with recent efforts by some developing countries – including Indonesia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Namibia – to ban or curb exports of these raw materials and build processing and manufacturing facilities as a way to grow their economies and develop sustainably.
Why is China’s co-operation essential?
During India’s G20 presidency in 2023, its officials pushed for the group to develop a shared vision on critical minerals. India’s renewable energy secretary Bhupinder Singh Bhalla spoke of the need “for a cost-effective and risk-proof scale-up of clean energy through diversified supply chains and distributive expansion of [the] manufacturing base”.
But the plan fell through after it was opposed by China, meaning that the aim to have “critical minerals and materials beneficiated at source” received only a brief mention in the final G20 declaration that year.
China dominates the global critical minerals supply chain. The Asian powerhouse refines 68% of nickel globally, 40% of copper, 59% of lithium, and 73% of cobalt, according to research by the Brookings Institution and Results for Development. Another report from Southern Transitions shows that China – with the largest global manufacturing capacity for key renewable energy technologies – was the destination for more than half of Africa’s critical mineral ore exports in 2023.
That is a global advantage China will not easily concede, said Olimpia Pilch, chief strategy officer at The Critical Minerals Africa Group (CMAG). “It is not in China’s interest” for other developing countries to gain more value from critical mineral refining, as this would “threaten China’s leverage” with rival super powers, she said.
What’s more, breaking into the complex space of making products from critical minerals will be “very difficult”, she added, as China is increasingly banning exports of processing equipment and closely guarding its intellectual property and operational know-how.
Africa’s lack of reliable energy supplies and infrastructure
China is not the only obstacle to boosting beneficiation across the Global South. Pilch said many countries that have deposits of critical minerals, including in Africa, lack “almost all of the key ingredients to enable profitable processing and refining”.
Barriers include limited supplies of cheap and reliable energy to convert ore into usable materials and metals; inadequate transport infrastructure; insufficient domestic consumer demand to spur manufacturing; and constrained access to cheap finance due to the high investment risk associated with many African nations.
Thando Lukuko, Climate Action Network’s director for South Africa, said South Africa would struggle to advance its G20 beneficiation plan because resource-rich poorer countries generate a large share of their income from mineral exports and lack the infrastructure needed to process raw materials. “Where’s the money going to come from for that?” he asked.
The rules of the global economic game work against those countries, preventing them from moving away from their status as simple raw material exporters, according to Anabella Rosemberg, senior advisor on just transition at Climate Action Network International.
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For example, the World Trade Organisation generally considers domestic content requirements – which mandate companies to purchase or use a certain percentage of locally produced goods – “as a violation of free trade principles and [they] are therefore prohibited”.
Another problem is clauses embedded in bilateral trade agreements that can prevent countries from introducing policies that retroactively ask foreign investors to add value to the minerals they are extracting, Rosemberg noted, calling for more “openness” from developed countries on value addition.
She welcomed South Africa’s willingness to take on the topic in the G20 negotiations, adding that it could create more awareness on how these barriers intersect with prosperity in the Global South.
Can South Africa seal a G20 deal on critical minerals?
In Davos, Ramaphosa said there is a need to reform the WTO and global financial institutions to be more representative and responsive to citizens’ needs. He promised that South Africa “will use this G20 to champion the use of critical minerals through a programme of green industrialisation and as an engine for growth and development in Africa, and the rest of the Global South”.
Mahendra Shunmoogam, South Africa’s director of foreign trade policy, told Climate Home that a key focus of the G20 this year will be to work out how to “bring about better outcomes for global trade” and make it more inclusive.
He said progress is being made, adding that South Africa has the full backing of the G77+China group of developing countries, with all members of the bloc agreeing to push for beneficiation of critical minerals at source during the 2024 Third South Summit.
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The summit’s outcome document references it only briefly, however, calling “for a coherent set of policy actions at the national, regional and international levels to support the need for developing countries rich in critical minerals to add value to their supply chains as a way of contributing to their economic structural transformation, creating decent employment, increasing export revenues, and participating in the process of economic development”.
Shunmoogam, who is part of the G20 trade and investment working group, said so far there have been no objections to talks on beneficiation from member countries – which are still at an early stage – and he therefore expects them to co-operate on securing a positive result.
The text of a framework on green industralisation that will support the creation of value chains in developing countries will be negotiated this year during South Africa’s presidency, he added.
He suggested that resource-rich countries, such as those in Africa, should develop a regional approach – for example, minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo could be refined in Botswana and assembled elsewhere on the continent. “We do want the minerals from the Global South to add value in the Global South,” he emphasised.
Rosemberg said that South Africa, as G20 president, will need to work with recommendations outlined in a recent report from the UN Secretary-General’s panel of experts on value addition. It states that beneficiation of minerals can spur industrialisation and economic development, therefore “all countries, in particular developing countries, should have an equitable opportunity to harness technological innovation, participate in global mineral value chains and to benefit from these”.
Shunmoogam noted that there are different resolutions by a range of multilateral organisations supporting the processing of minerals at their source, and South Africa aims to collate these as a basis for further discussion at the G20.
Pilch of the CMAG said, however, that for beneficiation to be achieved in Africa and other mineral-rich parts of the developing world, “collective action would need to be taken by G20 to tackle China’s monopoly and invest in growth to boost demand outside of China”.
The post South Africa’s G20 push for local processing of transition minerals faces barriers appeared first on Climate Home News.
South Africa’s G20 push for local processing of transition minerals faces barriers
From cross-border pipelines for green hydrogen that can also carry natural gas, to sustainable aviation fuel that threatens forests, and costly carbon capture projects that are used to recover more oil, “false solutions” to climate change have gained ground in recent years, often backed by fossil fuel firms.
A new research paper, published last month in the journal Energy Research and Social Science, shines a light on this trend, exploring such projects that have also caused environmental injustices such as air pollution or depriving communities of their source of income.
The study by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), in collaboration with the University of Sussex, is based on 48 cases of environmental conflicts around the world, contained in the ICTA-UAB’s Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas).
The selected cases range from Norway’s Trollvind offshore wind farm, built partly to decarbonise the power supply to the Troll and Oseberg oil and gas fields; to US fossil fuel firms working with the dairy industry to turn manure into biogas; and a tree plantation in the Republic of Congo proposed by TotalEnergies, where locals say they have been prevented from accessing their customary farmland.
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The researchers argue that “false solutions” – which also include large-scale carbon offsetting projects, many of which have been discredited – help to reinforce the political and economic power of the industry that is responsible for the climate crisis, and are undermining the global energy transition.
Climate Home News spoke to co-author Freddie Daley, a research associate at the University of Sussex’s Centre for Global Political Economy, about the paper’s findings and implications for climate policy.
Q: What was your motivation in exploring these types of “false solutions” to the climate crisis?
A: It’s very much a reaction to the fossil fuel industry insisting these technologies are solutions, rather than us creating a typology of things that are not working. All of the [paper’s] authors are very keen on a habitable planet – and we’re not going to let perfection be the enemy of the good.
But this is a call [to] arms to say that governments need to be very careful about what they’re giving public subsidy to, because in a complex situation – where there’s an urgency for reducing emissions but also for creating sustainable livelihoods and for ensuring that the needs of people living in and around these projects are met – I think it’s very important to scrutinise the viability of these schemes.
The starting point was off the back of oil majors – or so-called integrated energy companies – coming out and being very bullish on sustainability and net zero, and alongside this, proffering that they were part of the solution to climate mitigation, energy transition, job creation, green growth. And we took this as a problem statement to begin our analysis: How can fossil companies be part of the solution?
Q: What did your work reveal about “false solutions” and how can it deepen understanding of them?
A: “False solutions” is a term that’s been used for many, many years by Indigenous groups and by frontline communities – so we wanted to formalise it because it’s not really been engaged with in academic literature so far. We thought it was quite a big gap that needed to be filled.
We thought how can we categorise it? How can we help redefine it? What are the characteristics of these false solutions? So we dug into the data, the EJ Atlas, across many technologies – from hydrogen through to carbon offsets and biofuels, but also renewable energy projects, because we were finding that renewable energy projects causing conflicts were either being used to fuel fossil fuel production, such as solar panels or wind turbines to run rigs, which we thought was an interesting pattern – and also utility-scale renewable energy projects which were operated by fossil fuel firms.
Out of total energy generation, fossil fuel companies’ production of renewables is a tiny, tiny fraction. Why do these projects exist, and how do they operate within the broader energy system? We wanted to look at what their function was – and going through the data and the lived experience of the communities on the frontlines of these projects, we found that they’re very much used to legitimise fossil fuel expansion or just continued operation.
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And then we also looked at the governmental role within the institutions as well – so fossil fuel firms using these technologies and these false solutions as ways to garner public subsidy, particularly for carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen, to some degree.
And what we found across all these cases was they did very little to reduce emissions and generated environmental conflicts… and they ultimately delayed an energy transition, or the sort of industrial transformation that’s required to deliver deep and rapid emissions cuts.
Q: Shouldn’t fossil fuel companies be able to use all the climate solutions available to help reduce their emissions while the world is transitioning away from coal, oil and gas?
A: My response [to that argument] is to actually look at the data. When people say hydrogen and CCS are very important and they’re crucial, I don’t disagree with the idea that we might need some sort of technology to suck carbon out the atmosphere at some point in the future. But currently, the operational projects are not delivering that, and fossil fuel projects should not be expanded on the premise that future technologies can undo their emissions.
Just a few weeks ago, the Financial Times ran a very big story about how most of the oil majors have cancelled all their hydrogen projects because the scale of it’s not there yet, and they don’t think it’s going to stack up. These are companies with huge amounts of capital in an easy-to-abate sector – energy – saying we’re not going to do this. So you have to question the plan of hydrogen as a solution, if even the people that have the expertise and the capital to make it work are saying we’re not going to do this because we cannot make it work.
Likewise with carbon capture, many of the large energy projects and energy producers that have garnered vast amounts of public subsidies on the promise that they will do carbon capture are cutting those research projects down.
So at this stage in the energy transition – which some people call the “mid transition”, the difficult part – I think we need to scrutinise these technologies and look at what they do deliver on a project-by-project basis, and then on an aggregate basis.
Q: High-carbon industries say they need government subsidies to cover the high cost of researching, developing and creating markets for new technologies to help combat climate change. Is this justified?
A: I’m a big believer in the idea that the energy transition – the ideal energy transition, which is one of scaling up new industry while phasing out an old one – is going to require not only public money, but public coordination. That means states actively stewarding investment, picking winners and sequencing what is going to be a highly disruptive process.
I think public subsidy is necessary. We need to see deep and rapid decarbonisation, especially in wealthy industrialised states, but it should be used in a very targeted way to scale up technologies which have a marked impact on emissions and also uplift welfare as well – so heat pumps insulating homes in poorer communities. With these sort of things, you get your bang for your buck.
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You don’t get bang for your buck giving BP and Shell money to pilot a carbon capture and storage facility. It’s an extension of existing relationships between big business and government that needs to be looked at closely in the context of energy transition, because ultimately, these companies are not serious about transitioning at the requisite speed or scale to stave off climate disaster.
Look at both oil and gas companies’ ownership of renewable assets (1.42% of operational renewable projects around the world) and the renewables share of their primary generation (0.13%). They have the capital, and they have the know-how to do this. They haven’t done it. The question is, why do they need more public subsidy to continue not doing it?
This interview was shortened and edited for clarity.
The post Q&A: “False” climate solutions help keep fossil fuel firms in business appeared first on Climate Home News.
Q&A: “False” climate solutions help keep fossil fuel firms in business
Climate Change
States Say They Need More Help Replacing Lead Pipes. Congress May Cut the Funding Instead.
The U.S. House voted to cut millions promised for the work this year. The Senate will vote this week, as advocates and some lawmakers push back.
The Senate is taking up a spending package passed by the House of Representatives that would cut $125 million in funding promised this year to replace toxic lead pipes.
States Say They Need More Help Replacing Lead Pipes. Congress May Cut the Funding Instead.
Here are 6 inspiring books discussing oceans, critiques of capitalism, the Indigenous fight for environmental justice, and hope—for your upcoming reading list this year.
The Deepest Map: The High-Stakes Race to Chart the World’s Oceans
by Laura Trethewey (2023)
This book reminds me of the statement saying that people hear more about the moon and other planets in space than what lies beneath Earth’s oceans, which are often cited as ‘scary’ and ‘harsh’. Through investigative and in-depth reportage, ocean journalist and writer Laura Trethewey tackles important aspects of ocean mapping.
The mapping and exploration can be very useful to understand more about the oceans and to learn how we can protect them. On the other hand, thanks to neoliberal capitalism, it can potentially lead to commercial exploitation and mass industrialisation of this most mysterious ecosystem of our world.
The Deepest Map is not as intimidating as it sounds. Instead, it’s more exciting than I anticipated as it shows us more discoveries we may little know of: interrelated issues between seafloor mapping, geopolitical implications, ocean exploitation due to commercial interest, and climate change.
The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
by Katharina Pistor (2019)
Through The Code of Capital, Katharina Pistor talks about the correlation between law and the creation of wealth and inequality. She noted that though the wealthy love to claim hard work and skills as reasons why they easily significantly generate their fortunes, their accumulation of wealth would not last long without legal coding.
“The law is a powerful tool for social ordering and, if used wisely, has the potential to serve a broad range of social objectives: yet, for reasons and with implications that I attempt to explain, the law has been placed firmly in the service of capital,” she stated.
The book does not only show interesting takes on looking at inequality and the distribution of wealth, but also how those people in power manage to hoard their wealth with certain codes and laws, such as turning land into private property, while lots of people are struggling under the unjust system.
The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet
by Leah Thomas (2022)
Arguing that capitalism, racism, and other systems of oppression are the drivers of exploitation, activist Leah Thomas focuses on addressing the application of intersectionality to environmental justice through The Intersectional Environmentalist. Marginalised people all over the world are already on the front lines of the worsening climate crisis yet struggling to get justice they deserve.
I echo what she says, as a woman born and raised in Indonesia where clean air and drinkable water are considered luxury in various regions, where the extreme weather events exacerbated by the climate crisis hit the most vulnerable communities (without real mitigation and implementations by the government while oligarchies hijack our resources).
I think this powerful book is aligned with what Greenpeace has been speaking up about for years as well, that social justice and climate justice are deeply intertwined so it’s crucial to fight for both at the same time to help achieve a sustainable future for all.
As Long As Grass Grows
by Dina Gilio-Whitaker (2019)
Starting with the question “what does environmental justice look like when Indigenous people are at the centre?” Dina Gilio-Whitaker takes us to see the complexities of environmental justice and the endless efforts of Indigenous people in Indian country (the lands and communities of Native American tribes) to restore their traditional cultures while healing from the legacy of trauma caused by hundreds of years of Western colonisation.
She emphasizes that what distinguishes Indigenous peoples from colonisers is their unbroken spiritual relationship to their ancestral homelands. “The origin of environmental justice for Indigenous people is dispossession of land in all its forms; injustice is continually reproduced in what is inherently a culturally genocidal structure that systematically erases Indigenous people’s relationships and responsibilities to their ancestral places,” said Gilio-Whitaker.
I believe that the realm of today’s modern environmentalism should include Indigenous communities and learn their history: the resistance, the time-tested climate knowledge systems, their harmony with nature, and most importantly, their crucial role in preserving our planet’s biodiversity.
The Book of Hope
by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams with Gail Hudson (2021)
The Book of Hope is a marvelous glimpse into primatologist and global figure Jane Goodall’s life and work. The collaborator of the book, journalist Douglas Abrams, makes this reading experience even more enjoyable by sharing the reflective conversations between them, such as the definition of hope, and how to keep it alive amid difficult times.
Sadly, as we all know, Jane passed away this year. We have lost an incredible human being in the era when we need more someone like her who has inspired millions to care about nature, someone whose wisdom radiated warmth and compassion. Though she’s no longer with us, her legacy to spread hope stays.
Ocean: Earth’s Last Wilderness
by David Attenborough and Colin Butfield (2025)
“I could only have dreamed of recording in the early stages of my career, and we have changed the ocean so profoundly that the next hundred years could either witness a mass extinction of ocean life or a spectacular recovery.”
The legend David Attenborough highlights how much humans have yet to understand the ocean in his latest book with Colin Butfield. The first part of it begins with what has happened in a blue whale’s lifetime. Later it takes us to coral reefs, the deep of the ocean, kelp forest, mangroves, even Arctic, Oceanic seamounts, and Southern Ocean. The book contains powerful stories and scientific facts that will inspire ocean lovers, those who love to learn more about this ecosystem, and those who are willing to help protect our Earth.
To me, this book is not only about the wonder of the ocean, but also about hope to protect our planet. Just like what Attenborough believes: the more people understand nature, the greater our hope of saving it.
Kezia Rynita is a Content Editor for Greenpeace International, based in Indonesia.
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