The boom in electric vehicles is a bright spot in the fight against climate change as the rapid adoption of EVs reduces fossil fuel use and the greenhouse gas emissions from transportation.
But the surging demand for lithium, cobalt, nickel and other critical minerals used to make EV batteries raises concerns about the environmental and social impacts of mining and processing.
Human rights groups have reported abuses such as forced labor and unsafe conditions in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and environmentalists say nickel mining threatens Indonesia's forests.
"We don't want to happen what happened with the fossil fuels," Dario Liguti told Newsweek. Liguti directs sustainable energy at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, or UNECE, which is leading an effort to avoid a repeat of past abuses in mineral mining.
"You had an unsustainable exploitation of those resources, and you had many emerging countries which did not reap the benefits of their wealth," he said.
At an event Wednesday at the U.N. COP28 climate talks underway in Dubai, the U.N. representatives urged national and industry leaders to adopt a framework to ensure that mining and processing of critical minerals for clean technology are done in a sustainable manner.
According to the International Energy Agency, meeting emissions reductions targets will require six times the current supply of critical minerals by 2040. Over the next two decades, the IEA projects demand for nickel and cobalt to grow by at least 60 percent and demand for lithium to nearly double, testing an industry that Liguti said needs to modernize.
"This is an industry that has not really changed for many, many years, and it needs to change right now," Liguti said.
Undermining Forests
"We cannot discuss nickel or batteries from nickel without involving Indonesia," Timer Manurung told Newsweek in an interview at COP28 in Dubai's Expo City. Manurung is chairman of Auriga Nusantara, an environmental research group in Jakarta, Indonesia, and he traveled to Dubai to raise awareness about how the demand for EVs is affecting people and ecosystems in his country.
Indonesia is home to roughly a fifth of the global supply of nickel, an important mineral for battery manufacturing. Indonesia banned exports of raw nickel ore, encouraging a boom in nickel smelters in the country. That has accelerated mining to the point that Manurung said it is now a major source of deforestation and pollution.
Manurung described the waste from mining being dumped directly into the sea, and he said nickel is now responsible for more deforestation in Indonesia than are palm oil plantations.
While many of his fellow environmentalists view EVs as a climate solution, Manurung said the supply chain supporting EVs undermines the natural climate benefits that forests offer.
"At the moment I see the electric vehicles as more a problem rather than solution," he said.
But he said he sees positive movement as more automakers and consumers become aware of the EV supply chain problems.
"Our mission is to inform the parties here about the situation because I think that they do not know the reality," he said.
In meeting after meeting at COP28, he has pressed for ways to ensure that automakers buy "deforestation-free" nickel.
"Informing all government leaders, decision-makers, automakers, big brands, I think that's the way," Manurung said.
Sustainable Supply
Providence College associate professor Thea Riofrancos has traveled to Chile's Atacama Desert region as part of her research on resource extraction and green technologies.
The high desert is a major source of the world's supply of lithium, another critical mineral for EV batteries, and she said Chilean regulators have expressed concerns about environmental impacts on the fragile environment.
"Any extractive process that implicates the water system there is concerning," she told Newsweek.
The boom in demand for lithium is cause for concern about the impacts on places like Chile that will produce the supply, she said.
"I'm a big advocate of the renewable energy transition," she said, "but I think that transition should be just and equitable."
Riofrancos said there is a clear need for better governance at the sites of extraction but there are also ways to ease the demand pressure.
"There's a lot of ways to reduce demand for new mining," she said. "It can happen through recycling and materials recovery or designing batteries that are just more efficient with their material use."
The UNECE's Liguti said the U.N. has developed systems for classification and management of resources that offer a path to improve the standards for sourcing critical minerals.
A framework classification for resources developed by the UNECE identifies the environmental and social aspects of critical minerals, and a U.N. resource management system provides a set of principles for sustainable extraction and development.
As those systems become more widely used, Liguti said, automakers and battery manufacturers can better understand the upstream impacts of the materials they buy.
Liguti said that sort of transparency and accountability in critical mineral sourcing could make extraction more sustainable and help companies avoid bottlenecks in supplies as they ramp up battery production to meet the climate challenge.
"We need to go much faster," he said. "We need it now, not in 10 to 15 years, and so we need to move now."
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