The world should question its skyrocketing demand for energy-transition minerals and the roll-out of ineffective climate measures that damage people and the planet, the UN’s special rapporteur on climate change and human rights has warned.

“The need for critical minerals in terms of climate action is an assumption that we need to challenge,” Elisa Morgera told an online event hosted by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) on Wednesday.

This should include asking “how do we take into account over-consumption by the super-rich, which we know are contributing to climate change in ways that are non-comparable to the vast majority of the world’s population,” she said.

Morgera called for “a step back… to ensure that any decisions around critical minerals are taken with a full understanding of the potential impacts on the environment and on everyone’s human rights”. That should also entail “prior, comprehensive and independent assessments of the need for critical minerals and whether there are alternatives to extraction”, she added.

The acceleration of clean energy technology deployment has spurred a global race for the metals and minerals that are needed to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles. Many of them – from copper to lithium and nickel – are sourced from the Global South using extractive models that have harmed the environment and local communities.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has projected that demand for these minerals could triple by 2030 and quadruple by 2040 as the green transition accelerates, which would require vast investments in new mining developments.

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But mining comes with unavoidable environmental and social trade-offs, which need to be fully understood, Morgera told the panel of critical mineral experts.

She argued for moving away from the “inaccurate idea” that there is “conflict” between urgently addressing climate change and protecting the human rights of Indigenous peoples on whose territories critical minerals are often extracted. This is about “everyone’s human right to a healthy environment,” she added.

Those working on the issue should “ask critical questions at the outset about who’s going to benefit from a proposed development and what assumptions are framing that understanding of benefits”, she said.

Morgera, an Italian professor of global environmental law at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, previously worked on the links between human rights and healthy oceans. She took on the role of UN special rapporteur last year.

Land-grabbing on the rise

Across the world, communities in mineral-producing countries – from Indonesia, to Chile and the Democratic Republic of Congo – have reported environmental destruction and human rights abuses linked to the mining of transition minerals.

Ketakandriana Rafitoson, director of Publish What You Pay, an NGO that advocates for financial transparency in the extractive industry, told the event that besides the environmental, food and water impacts faced by some communities in mineral-producing countries, land grabbing is becoming a bigger issue.

“Territorial rights violations is something which is growing, and it is often linked to the fact that Indigenous peoples and local communities voices, including the right to say no to mining, are not always taken into account or heard,” she said.

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Last year, the UN Secretary-General’s Panel on Critical Minerals outlined seven principles for developing critical mineral supply chains with justice, equity and human rights at their core.

The panel called for “balancing consumption with sustainable supply, especially in high-income countries” to reduce environmental impacts. It cited innovation and product design, such as reducing the size of electric vehicle batteries, material efficiency gains and building circular supply chains, as ways to reduce demand.

Recycling and fairer use

Recycling minerals could reduce the need for new mining projects and help mitigate the environmental and social impacts of mining. But the use of recycled materials has so far failed to keep pace with rising material consumption, according to the IEA.

Meanwhile, global resource extraction is accelerating. Resource use is projected to grow 60% by 2060, which the UN says could derail efforts to achieve global climate, biodiversity and pollution targets, as well as human well-being and economic prosperity.

High-income countries use six times more materials and are responsible for ten times more climate impacts per capita than low-income ones, according to the UN’s Global Resource Outlook report. It called for reducing the resource intensity of the wealthiest economies to allow poorer nations to use more resources, where they are most needed.

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The UN, meanwhile, is digging deeper into the issues surrounding critical minerals.

Special rapporteur Morgera is seeking inputs on the positive and negative human rights impacts of the full life-cycle of renewable energy, including the extraction and re-use of critical minerals, and will present a report at the UN in October.

This is “a really important opportunity for us to fully explore and understand the trade-offs and where we have foreseeable negative impacts on the environment and human rights that we can and must prevent,” she said.

(Reporting by Chloé Farand; editing by Megan Rowling)

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We must challenge rising demand for transition minerals, says UN rapporteur