Delegates at last month’s U.N. climate change summit, or COP30, adopted a new mechanism to coordinate action on a just energy transition worldwide toward a low-carbon economy, away from fossil fuels. However, a proposal at the conference in Brazil to include language on critical minerals within the mechanism’s scope was scrapped at the last minute after China and Russia failed to support it. Critical minerals like lithium, cobalt and nickel are crucial for renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles, but their mining and processing has been linked to negative environmental and social impacts. An earlier draft text on the just energy transition included a paragraph recognizing “the social and environmental risks associated with scaling up supply chains for clean energy technologies, including risks arising from the extraction and processing of critical minerals.” This is the first time that critical minerals were included in a text within climate negotiations under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Sources told Mongabay that Australia, the EU, the African Group of Negotiators, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and many Latin American countries supported the inclusion. “In the second week, however, China made it clear that any inclusion of language about minerals governance was a red line, and thus ensured its exclusion even when many countries and large negotiating blocs had tabled language and argued in favor,” Emily Iona Stewart, head of transition minerals policy and EU relations at the NGO Global Witness, told Mongabay by email. “The text that was tabled…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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