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Global shift to EVs, renewables and AI hinges on critical minerals like lithium and cobalt.
A new report warned green transition is deepening injustice.
Mining in the Global South depletes water, generates toxic waste and harms health.
The benefits, however, are enjoyed by rich countries, echoing colonial-era extraction.
The global push for clean energy and digital innovation is both necessary and urgent. From electric vehicles (EV) to renewable power and artificial intelligence (AI), these technologies promise a more sustainable future. Yet the transition carries a troubling contradiction: The very effort to protect the planet is imposing disproportionate environmental and human costs on the world’s most vulnerable communities.
At the heart of this paradox are critical minerals, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite, essential to the “fourth industrial revolution”. Demand for these materials has surged dramatically in recent years and is projected to rise even further. A report by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UN IWEH) estimated that meeting global climate targets will require a nine times increase in lithium demand and a doubling of cobalt and nickel demand by 2040.
By 2050, the demand could be four times higher still if current consumption patterns and extractive policies persist. For lithium, graphite and cobalt, increases of around 500 per cent are plausible. Extraction, however, comes at a steep and often hidden cost, the report highlighted.
Mining is concentrated in parts of the Global South, where environmental regulations are weaker and communities more exposed. These regions bear the brunt of water depletion, pollution and health risks, even as the benefits of clean technologies flow primarily to wealthier nations.
Referring to critical minerals as the “oil of the 21st century”, the report drew an uncomfortable parallel with the fossil fuel era and asked: “Could the global rush to extract critical minerals be a reproduction of the neoliberal extractive colonialism which is worsening pre-existing inequalities and injustices in the Global South? In other words, can it be argued that in its rush toward sustainability, the world is employing a set of policy and economic tools that facilitate deregulation, privatisation, and extraction of natural resources, labor, and wealth from less developed regions for the benefit of more powerful nations or corporations with the "sustainability transition" justification?”
Without deliberate policy intervention, it warned, the energy transition risks repeating that pattern, creating new “sacrifice zones” in mineral-rich but economically marginalised regions.
Water use is one of the most pressing concerns. The report Critical Minerals, Water Insecurity and Injustice said the extraction of critical minerals contributes directly to the depletion and contamination of freshwater sources. Yet, the extractive operations of these critical minerals are concentrated in areas where about a billion people still lack access to basic drinking water, thereby creating considerable public health risks and jeopardising local livelihoods that depend on these resources.
The report estimated that in 2024, global lithium output (excluding US production) of roughly 240,000 tonnes would have consumed an estimated 456 billion litres of water, equivalent to the annual domestic water needs of 62 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, roughly the population of Tanzania.
In the triangle, encompassed by the borders of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile is one of the world's richest places in terms of lithium reserves, while being one of the world's poorest places in terms of water availability. In such arid environments, lithium mining is projected to further escalate the problem of water scarcity to unprecedented levels, increasing both ecological degradation and the vulnerability of local populations.
Empirical evidence indicates that in Chile's Salar de Atacama, lithium mining alone accounts for up to 65 per cent of regional water usage, intensifying competition with agriculture and domestic needs and driving dramatic groundwater depletion. Mining in the salt flats of the Lithium Triangle involves pumping large volumes of lithium-rich brine from underground aquifers and leaving it to evaporate in large ponds. Although brine water is not suitable for human consumption or agricultural use, its large-scale extraction can disrupt local hydrological cycle and freshwater aquifers.
Globally, about a sixth (16 per cent) of critical minerals reserves are located in high water-stress regions, while 54 per cent of energy transition minerals sit on or near indigenous territories. Expanding extraction in these regions is therefore likely to exacerbate water scarcity, intensify competition for limited freshwater supplies and threaten the availability of water for other equally critical sectors, including agriculture and domestic supplies.
The environmental toll extends beyond water scarcity. The production of rare earth elements generates massive quantities of toxic waste — around 2,000 tonnes for every tonne of usable material. In 2024, global rare earth production generated an estimated 707 million tonnes of toxic waste, enough to fill about 59 million garbage trucks — a number of trucks that could form a queue circling the equator 13 times. This waste often contaminates ecosystems and threatens long-term public health.
Nowhere are these impacts more visible than in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which supplies a significant share of the world’s cobalt. Almost 72 per cent of people living near mining sites reported skin diseases and 56 per cent of women and girls reported gynecological problems. Birth defect rates in maternal wards near DRC mining areas are markedly elevated compared to those farther away, including neural tube defects (which can lead to serious infant brain and spine defects) at a rate of 10.9 per 10,000 births and lower limb defects at 8.8 per 10,000 births, the report found. Child labour is also prevalent. The report stated that around 30 per cent of mining sites in the DRC employ children, who typically lack basic health and safety protections.
Despite the country’s vast mineral wealth, over 70 per cent of the DRC’s population lives on less than $2.15 per day, highlighting a stark disconnect between resource abundance and local well-being. In DRC, more than 80 per cent of mineral output is controlled by foreign industrial mines, limiting local economic gains, the report highlighted.
Technological disruptions are needed and useful. But we should be aware of and proactively address their unintended consequences if we want the whole world to equally benefit from them, said Kaveh Madani, Director, UNU-INWEH, who led the investigation team. “You cannot call a transition green, sustainable and just if it simply moves the environmental harm from the rich to the poor, and from one group of people or region to another.”
Abraham Nunbogu, scientist at UNU-INWEH, the report’s lead author, said green energy transition is among the most important undertakings of our time. But the evidence we've gathered showed that the communities doing the actual digging, breathing the dust and losing access to clean water are largely excluded from its benefits. “If we don't correct the governance failures driving this, we will have built the clean energy economy of the future on the same extractive injustices as the fossil fuel economy of the past,” Nunbogu added.
The authors of the report called for a fundamental shift in how the global community governs critical mineral supply chains. Key recommendations included mandatory international due diligence standards to replace voluntary compliance, legally binding mechanisms for ethical sourcing and environmental justice, strict pollution and wastewater controls including zero-discharge systems, and independent monitoring of water use and heavy metal contamination.
The experts also advocated for investment in circular economy solutions, including advanced recycling of batteries, electronics and renewable energy components, to reduce pressure on primary extraction.
They noted that the issues bear directly on progress towards UN Sustainable Development Goals 6 (clean water and sanitation), 3 (good health and well-being), 1 (no poverty), 7 (affordable and clean energy) and 10 (reduced inequalities).
Drawing on empirical analyses, scientific studies and field evidence from the Lithium Triangle, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other high-risk extraction regions, the report presented what the authors described as one of the most overlooked injustices of the global sustainability transition.
Importantly, the report made clear this is not exclusively a problem of distant or developing regions. The Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada, the largest known lithium deposit in the United States, would require up to 3.5 billion litres of water annually, largely by diverting water rights from farming communities in the Quinn River Valley.
In Canada, the 2014 Mount Polley copper / gold mine disaster in the British Columbia released roughly 25 million cubic metres of toxic waste into rivers and lakes, contaminating drinking water sources and devastating Indigenous communities. The experts called it one of Canada's worst mining-related environmental failures.
“Water insecurity is not a side effect of critical mineral mining, it is a systemic outcome of how the global supply chain is currently designed and governed,” said Madani. “Without binding international standards, mandatory disclosure, and genuine community co-governance, the demand surge projected for the coming decades will make the current situation dramatically worse.”
The report concluded that without binding global rules, the current system will continue to externalise environmental and health costs.