By Mana Starosta
From President Donald Trump’s recent $12 billion initiative to stockpile critical minerals to his bid to purchase Greenland, the race to control valuable minerals has never been more evident. Indeed, for many governments, obtaining critical minerals represents the key to national security, industrialisation, and the energy transition.
Critical minerals are defined as minerals that are “essential to countries' economies or development”. This includes energy transmission minerals (ETMs) that power many of the technologies poised to move us towards a low-carbon economy - from batteries and EVs to renewable energy systems. While this shift holds the promise of drastically reducing emissions, it also risks intensifying the environmental and human rights challenges historically linked to mining.
As communities, businesses, and governments step up efforts to avert the biodiversity crisis, and the world places its hopes in energy transition technologies to help avert the worst climate outcomes, tackling the environmental impacts of mining has taken on renewed urgency.
This article focuses on a key group of stakeholders: financiers, including banks and investors, who are increasingly responsible for assessing and mitigating biodiversity risks in mining, and ensuring compliance with environmental safeguards.
Image from EY (2022) (Link: https://www.ey.com/en_ca/insights/energy-resources/critical-minerals-supply-and-demand-challenges)
Mining can pose significant direct and indirect threats to habitats and biodiversity. When mines are developed to extract ETMs such as rare earth elements, lithium, copper, graphite, nickel, and cobalt, the land-use changes involved can destroy valuable ecosystems, pollute water sources through poor waste management, and deplete local water supplies.
These impacts are intertwined with long-standing concerns over human rights, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, labour rights, and the overall wellbeing of surrounding communities.
Image from Economist Intelligence (2024) (Link: https://www.eiu.com/n/critical-minerals-in-latam-opportunities-and-challenges/)
Financiers have the power to push for greater transparency and accountability across mineral supply chains. While awareness of mining’s biodiversity impacts is growing among investors, the sector remains high-risk.
A recent study by Oxfam found that EU banks were the third-largest financiers of critical mineral companies, providing $69 billion in loans and underwriting between 2016 and 2024. Yet, an analysis of the top EU-based financiers revealed that current due diligence processes do not fully capture the breadth of environmental and social risks linked to mining operations and supply chains.
On the environmental pillar of ESG policies, the eight leading financial institutions examined showed insufficient commitments to tackling mining’s ecological impacts. Furthermore they identified notable policy gaps when it came to mine reclamation, closure planning, and air pollution prevention.
As mining operations expand to meet surging demand, pressure is mounting to improve transparency, strengthen environmental expectations for mining companies, and adopt more rigorous value chain due diligence.
Despite the dangers associated with mining, demand for ETMs is growing and extraction will continue. Achieving a truly just transition will require confronting biodiversity impacts head-on and elevating mining standards.
While some companies promise “no net loss” or even “net-positive” biodiversity outcomes, experts agree that the priority should be to avoid impacts first, then minimise unavoidable harm, and finally restore biodiversity after closure - rather than relying on offsets or remediation measures after damage has occurred.
According to the WWF, “the overlap between key biodiversity areas and ETMs is small enough that avoidance is a viable strategy and should be the first consideration for mine owners and manufacturers sourcing ETMs”. Achieving this depends on robust biodiversity data on mining projects and mapping their proximity to key biodiversity areas. This information needs to then be communicated effectively to investors and other key stakeholders.
Image from TXF (2022) (Link: https://www.txfnews.com/articles/7425/more-countries-pursue-security-of-supply-of-critical-minerals)
The energy transition should not come at the expense of vital ecosystems. As global standards for nature protection mature, companies, investors, and regulators have a shared responsibility to embed biodiversity safeguards into every stage of the value chain - not as an afterthought, but as a core condition for success.
By Charlie Bouqueuniaux
Recap from the 12th Plenary Session of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (3–8 February 2026)
From 3 to 8 February 2026, the world’s leading biodiversity experts, policymakers, and observers gathered in Manchester for IPBES-12, a pivotal global event examining the critical links between business and biodiversity.
A central highlight of the week was the adoption of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) for the Business and Biodiversity Assessment, following detailed line-by-line negotiations.
The assessment provides a globally agreed scientific basis for understanding how businesses depend on, impact, and can help restore nature, making it a key reference point for public and private sector decision-making.
Beyond the business-nature interface, the agenda covered a broad range of interrelated biodiversity challenges.
Delegates reviewed progress on ecological connectivity, spatial planning, and the nexus assessment, which connects biodiversity to climate, food, water, and health systems. Proposals for future assessments, exploring biodiversity’s links with pollution, poverty, urbanisation, and climate change, were actively discussed.
The Plenary also addressed the importance of Indigenous and local knowledge systems, improved data infrastructure for biodiversity monitoring, and strategies to integrate diverse knowledge types into science-policy processes. New members of the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel (MEP) were elected, and revised procedures for observer engagement were adopted.
Recently, Dr. Eleanor Thomson, Lead Technologist at Gentian, presented at the “Impact Case Studies across Earth System Domains: New Space” workshop, held on 21 January 2026 at ESA’s ESTEC site in the Netherlands and online by invitation.
Speaking in one of the main auditoriums at ESA’s flagship facility, Eleanor showcased Gentian’s impact case study on how TRUTHS mission data could unlock more detailed and accurate biodiversity insights, especially for forest and peatland monitoring.
Thanks to its highly accurate measurements, TRUTHS can support much more detailed habitat mapping, for example, helping to clearly distinguish between untouched (primary) and regrown (secondary) forests, and offering better insight into the health of peatlands.
Eleanor explained that TRUTHS can also improve the accuracy of other satellite images by acting as a reference point. This would allow for more consistent and reliable mapping across different satellite systems.
Her talk reflected Gentian’s focus on using the latest satellite technology to solve real-world environmental and financial challenges, closely aligned with the workshop’s aim of applying space data to support better management of Earth’s systems.
We are currently building True Atlas to give organisations instant visibility into their nature-related risk. With more than 300 biodiversity regulations introduced in the past five years and sustainability reporting becoming mandatory across major markets, businesses across construction, infrastructure, renewable energy, mining, and agriculture urgently need scalable tools to avoid costly delays, compliance failures, and stranded assets.
Gentian True Atlas delivers AI-powered satellite analysis to detect endangered habitats and species at the site level while evaluating nature performance across entire portfolios, transforming months of manual analysis into minutes.
Following three pilots with a global pharmaceutical company, one of Japan’s Big Five construction firms, and a landscape architecture firm, our focus is now on full automation and scaling to meet growing market demand.
Sign up below to receive our next newsletter directly in your inbox.