21 d’abr. 2025
7 d’abr. 2025
Superpowers want to control critical mineral supplies — local communities need a stronger say
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00931-5?
The race of superpowers to regulate access to ‘critical minerals’ — such as cobalt, copper, lithium and rare-earth elements — poses enormous challenges to global stability. These minerals are crucial ingredients in batteries, electronics, solar panels and computer chips. And demand for them is soaring: it will more than quadruple by 2040 for clean-energy technologies alone (see go.nature.com/3zHuGNm). The United States, China and Europe are taking drastic steps to secure their supplies. In January, US President Donald Trump issued executive orders to promote domestic mining and processing of these essential minerals, as he did during his first term and as his predecessor, Joe Biden, did, too. Trump has even offered to buy mineral-rich Greenland, to the dismay of Denmark, of which the island is a territory. And he is calling on Ukraine to relinquish a large chunk of its critical minerals to the United States as part of a peace deal with Russia.
Meanwhile, in December, China restricted exports of critical minerals to the United States after the latter blocked the transfer of chips to the former. China controls the supply chains, including the processing, of most critical minerals and is heavily invested in mining throughout Africa, Latin America and Central Asia. The United States and the European Union have tried to challenge China’s monopoly by securing their own mining contracts, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Peru.
Risks of conflict, violence and crimes over these materials are growing. For instance, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, conflicts have erupted in mineral-rich provinces such as Haut-Katanga and Nord-Kivu. These are being fuelled by neighbouring countries, such as Rwanda and Uganda, which are encouraging the smuggling of minerals across borders to enrich themselves. Illicit artisanal mining — small-scale operations with minimal equipment — is on the rise and has produced a tug of war between the authorities and citizens to claw these materials out of the ground.
2 d’abr. 2025
13 de març 2025
9 de març 2025
7 de març 2025
17 de febr. 2025
27 de gen. 2025
The social and environmental complexities of extracting energy transition metals
Abstract
Environmental, social and governance pressures should feature in future scenario planning about the transition to a low carbon future. As low-carbon energy technologies advance, markets are driving demand for energy transition metals. Increased extraction rates will augment the stress placed on people and the environment in extractive locations. To quantify this stress, we develop a set of global composite environmental, social and governance indicators, and examine mining projects across 20 metal commodities to identify the co-occurrence of environmental, social and governance risk factors. Our findings show that 84% of platinum resources and 70% of cobalt resources are located in high-risk contexts. Reflecting heightened demand, major metals like iron and copper are set to disturb more land. Jurisdictions extracting energy transition metals in low-risk contexts are positioned to develop and maintain safeguards against mining-related social and environmental risk factors.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18661-9?fromPaywallRec=true
Biomass carbon emissions from nickel mining have significant implications for climate action
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55703-y
Global nickel demand is projected to double by 2050 to support low-carbon technologies and renewable energy production. However, biomass carbon emissions from clearing vegetation for nickel mining are rarely included in corporate sustainability reports or considered in mineral sourcing decisions. Here, we compiled data for 481 nickel mines and undeveloped deposits to show that the footprint of nickel mining could be 4 to 500 times greater than previously reported (depending on the mine site), and thus the environmental impacts of nickel products, including batteries, have been underestimated to date. We found large variation in biomass losses among mines, and, in many cases, these unaccounted carbon emissions were significant relative to other Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions from nickel extraction and processing. Reporting emissions from biomass losses from mining is key for strategic decision making on where to source nickel needed for effective climate action.
20 de gen. 2025
7 de gen. 2025
2 de gen. 2025
Digital services / Cloud computing
Calculating the carbon footprint of virtual desktop infrastructure
The Green Cloud Computing research project (in German) analysed the carbon footprint of a computer workspace equipped with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as compared to the classical solution. VDI means that the entire computer desktop in the data centre has been virtualised. All the specific settings, software products and data are no longer installed on the local computer but on a server in the data centre. This no longer requires the standard PC and energy-saving thin clients can be used instead, which serves as the interface to the server. Our calculations conclude that a workstation equipped with a VDI (thin client computer) generates 33 kilograms fewer emissions than a workstation using a notebook or a desktop PC. The calculations include the manufacturing costs for the hardware in the data centre and for the local thin client computers as well as the power consumption in the data centre and at the workstation. However, the sensitivity analysis shows that it is not always more favourable to the climate to move IT services to the cloud. What is important is the equipment of the local workstation, how IT is utilised and whether the infrastructure of the data centre is geared to requirements.
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