A MATERIALS WAR: UKRAINE AND THE RACE FOR RESOURCES

Wars are both political and material. Hidden underneath Ukraine’s fertile land are vast amounts of resources that global powers desperately want. The risk of a resource grab sold to the public as “rebuilding Ukraine” is very real, write Robin Roels, Diego Marin and Nick Meynen.

Wars have been fought and lost for access to energy, be it in the form of resources such as fossil fuels, or control of strategic industries like metallurgy, or agricultural lands. For example, oil may not have been the reason for the Iraq war, but it sure was a reason, and a major one.

The hunger for Ukraine’s resources

To feed the motor of continuous economic expansion, countries need ever more resources. Ukraine is one of the world’s most resource-rich countries. The Donbas and Mariupol regions alone contain in ‘commercially viable quantities’, a large majority of the most used minerals and metals in today’s economies.

A part of the 3 to 11.5 trillion dollars worth of resources in Ukraine is now under Russian boots. This includes elements such as tantalum and niobium that are used for green(er) technologies as well as aviation, transportation and construction. As the amounts of elements like tantalum and niobium are state secrets, it is hard to estimate how much of it is now in Russian hands, but these materials are found in Donetsk and south of Zaporizhzhia, which are occupied by Putin’s invading army.

In a complete turn-around from the 1980s manufacturing exodus to Southern countries, the US and the EU are now promoting on-shoring or friend-shoring: the strategy to get resources from their own territories and those of allies. Eight months before the start of the war, in July 2021, European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič had launched a strategic partnership on raw materials with Ukraine, with the purpose of “achieving a closer integration of raw materials and batteries value chains”. Ukraine was supposed to become a car battery hub for the EU.

In recent years, Ukraine has been busily expanding investment in mining. UkraineInvest, the government investment promotion office, received more than 100 investment proposals from across Europe and North America of up to $10 billion to develop 24 major mineral locations.

For decades, the Global North has extracted materials from the Global South in an unfair manner, keeping the industry that adds most value in the North while leaving the South to deal with most social and environmental impacts. Today, with  Europe’s influence in the Global South increasingly challenged by China, it seemed strategic for the EU to turn eyes to its eastern and south-eastern backyard, with Serbia standing out as the most recent example.

A reconstruction of the Ukrainian economy based on the EU’s objectives is likely to point in this direction, and make the country become a prime site for extraction and exploitation. However, the reconstruction of Ukraine must happen in a just way that respects planetary and social boundaries, as made clear by Andriy Andrusevych from Society and Environment, an Ukrainian member of the EEB.

There is no such thing as ‘green mining’

Green, environmentally friendly mining is just a myth that conceals a wide range of local environmental and social impacts – even when it serves the production of an electric car’s battery. Yet the EU’s response to the rising demand for metals and minerals to feed the twin digital and energy transitions has been to advocate for more mining within EU member states, as well as a renewed pursuit of raw materials diplomacy that will benefit Europe, but comes at a cost for the countries of extraction.

As a consequence, not only Ukraine but also many countries within the EU risk falling victim to the priorities of the European economy’s growth-fueled machinery. On top of this, the need for metals for the green transition is co-opted to start many new mining projects for raw materials that we do not need in the first place, such as gold and iron. Suddenly, all mining projects are becoming “energy transition projects.”

The risk is real that the proposed solution actually creates a new problem, without solving the original one. So far, the green energy transition has been a green energy addition: fossil fuel energy consumption has been increasing, rather than decreasing. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the worldwide growth in electricity demand has been slowing down in 2022. However, as long as the trend in energy demand remains positive, it will be impossible to satisfy Europe’s demand sustainably.

The path to peace and independence

The alternative to increasing our dependence on raw materials from other countries, is to need less of them in the first place. At the same time, the correlation between more material demands and more conflicts is very strong. A lot of our tensions with Russia would be solved if we needed less gas from them, something the European Commission is now actively working on. The same applies to raw materials.

This is clearly shown by the EEB’s LOCOMOTION project, which is improving an existing model that demonstrated that a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy systems could drive a steep re-materialisation of the economy. In a ‘Green Growth’ scenario, even when moving 100% towards renewables and boosting recyclability, cumulated extraction demand would surpass the current levels of reserves for tellurium, indium, tin, silver and gallium by 2060. All of these are key for renewable energy systems.

LOCOMOTION research further shows that material availability may pose serious problems in the next decades, especially in the case of solar. Hence, it is imperative to reduce both material and energy demand as well as to focus on recycling and substitution of materials for less environmentally impactful ones. We will still need materials in the future, for building our renewable energy grid and batteries to store energy, but taking the aforementioned measures will reduce pressures for their extraction.

We are all going to lose the battle for existence if we do not rethink how we use energy and raw materials. Green growth is a myth that keeps countries at odds with each other in this race for resources to deplete. There is only one viable peace settlement for this underlying war: embracing the limits to the growth of our economies, energy, and material consumption by setting targets, applying truly circular strategies – sharing, reusing, repairing and recycling – combined with cutting resource consumption that does not contribute to our wellbeing.

Just as we have learned that we cannot keep burning fossil fuels, we now have to come to terms with the limits of how much we can dig up, in a fair and just way, within our planetary boundaries.

Continuing the race for resources without considering systemic and demand-side solutions is likely to cause ever more environmental harm, insecurity and conflict. The opposite would be resource justice: the fair and considered distribution of the Earth’s resources without depleting them.

Written by Catapistas Robin Roels and Diego Marin, and Nick Meynen (EEB). Article originally published in META (EEB). Photo taken by Alberto Vázquez Ruiz.

CATAPA JOIN EEB to work on mining

CATAPA Joins Europe’s largest environmental network, the EEB

NEWS:

CATAPA Joins Europe’s largest environmental network

 

After several years of fruitful collaboration, CATAPA has formalised it’s membership as an associate member of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) – Europe’s largest network of environmental citizens’ organisations.  

…agenda setting, monitoring, advising on and influencing the way the EU deals with issues.

The EEB brings together over 160 civil society organisations from more than 35 European countries, representing some 30 million supporters and members. It stands for sustainable development, environmental justice & participatory democracy.

CATAPA looks forward to working as an associate of the EEB to tackle Europe’s most pressing environmental problems by agenda setting, monitoring, advising on and influencing how the EU deals with these issues.

The core areas which CATAPA will be working on include; the economic transition, mining and waste prevention, ecodesign in the ICT sector as well as more broadly engaging in policy on climate change, energy, global supply chains, degrowth, Buen vivir, urban mining and resource reduction strategies.

CATAPA looks forward to bringing its expertise to the EEB, to keep the raw materials issue in all its complexity on the EU agenda…

While the primary focus of the EEB’s work is on the EU and its decision-making processes, it works also on wider regional and global processes, at the level of the UN and the OECD, particularly on the Global Agenda for Sustainable Development.

CATAPA looks forward to bringing its expertise to the EEB, to keep the raw materials issue in all its complexity on the EU agenda and to work for an economic alternative that puts well-being, not growth, at the centre of our society.

The End of Naïve Europe,The Rise of Green Imperialism

Image: CRM deposits EU-27 (2020). Source: European Commission’s M(2020) 474 final.

ARTICLE:

Re-published from: Vázquez Ruiz, A. 2020. “Op-Ed: The End of Naïve Europe, The Rise of Green Imperialism.” Commodity Frontiers 1: 56-59. doi:10.18174/cf.2020a17975.

The End of Naïve Europe,The Rise of Green Imperialism

Author: Alberto Vázquez Ruiz

On 29 September 2020, the European Commission officially launched the European Raw Materials Alliance (ERMA), a publicly supported “industrial alliance dedicated to securing a sustainable supply of raw materials in Europe”. In other words, firing the starting pistol of public funding for the race to explore and extract mineral deposits outside the European Union and especially within its borders.

Until now, the EU had only been financing mining and metallurgical private companies under the pretext of technological innovation and market competition. Since the launch of Horizon 2020 in 2014, the Commission has been assembling the institutional tools (e.g. EIT Raw Materials, the Partnership Instrument) allowing to finance private technology developments inside the EU for exploration, exploitation and metallurgy. Horizon 2020 is finishing this year, but the instruments created remain and the technological excuse seems no longer needed.

“The era of a naïve Europe that solely relies on soft power is behind us”. With these words, Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, announced earlier this month the “EU action plan for critical raw materials”, which is the EC’s strategy to face the consequences of the commercial war between the USA and China and to encourage EU nation states to focus on raw materials as part of a post-COVID19 ‘green’ recovery plan.

The pandemia has indeed created the perfect momentum to call for support for this industry. However, resource extraction and its processing together represent 90% of biodiversity loss and water stress in the world. Bad news, as many experts have already pointed to the relation between  the pandemia and biodiversity loss.

It is impossible for the EC to ignore last year’s report by the International Resources Panel (UNEP), which clearly warned humanity that metal extraction and production has doubled health and climate change impacts from 2000 to 2015 solely. And today, mining and metallurgy are representing already 20% of all health impacts from air pollution and more than a quarter of global carbon emissions. So why is the Commission actually making this change of course?

The shift in its position has been justified as the “access to resources is a strategic security question for making the green and digital transformations a success”. Although the Commission claims to share the widespread will to combat climate change and to leave no person and no place behind in the process, the Commission also openly calls for an increased mining boom which will reinforce the pressing systemic problem facing people and planet.

While green technologies are based on energy sources which are renewable, their machines are not. Electricity generation based on solar, wind, tidal… generators rely on metals (many metals if you consider off-grid technologies). The planned transition without socio-economic restructuring towards schemes that push for drastic reduction in consumption of energy, will just move us from an energy matrix based on the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels towards a loop of increasing extraction and processing of metals for the manufacturing of metal-based solutions.

It could be argued that a society based on metal-based technologies is a sustainable scenario because we would be able to recycle these elements in the future, but the reality is very far from this. The IRP-UNEP also warned us that “only 18 metals have recycling rates higher than 50%”. For the rare earths elements (REEs) needed in most green energy technologies, the recycling rate reaches just 1%.  What will happen in 30 years when the energy machines are already obsolete and fossil fuels are no longer efficient to be extracted? Mining, metallurgy and manufacturing industries are the biggest energy consumers. “What is happening today is nothing less than a massive PR campaign to sell the idea that mining is not only necessary but it can also be sustainable,” said Nick Meynen, Policy officer at the European Environmental Bureau (EEB).

While the EC’s Action Plan does recognise the need for improving recycling rates and the importance of reinforcing the circular economy, it lacks a coherent set of proposals that could tackle the reasons behind the low recycling rates and the slow implementation of a circular economy. There are no regulations for recyclability (yes, but more importantly there are no restrictions on production, so materials can be mixed in a way which make the products poorly recyclable, but cheaper – it is not a end-of-use technological issue), repairability (modularity in products and regulations to end the monopoly on spare parts production), reusability (plans on how to proceed with older machines). 

Breton recognises that the “post-war world architecture is faltering”, but the proposed treatment seems to be confusing the disease and the cure. His decision will accelerate the process, shaking the social foundations of our civilization even harder, instead of rebuilding our system by attacking the true causes of our current crisis. It can be seen both as a symptom of political negligence or as a part of a more complex agenda towards green imperialism.

Europe has expressed its aim to become the green energy superpower. However, the amount of minerals that the EC considers necessary for the future transition is extreme and the global metal demand already increased by 87% from 1980 to 2008. “Critical raw materials” (a techno-political rebranding of the elements the EC considers necessary today) are increasingly required for batteries in electric vehicles and off-grid generation and storage, among others. There is no way of getting that huge amount of resources without pushing social peace to its limits – also inside the EU.

“The transition to a low-carbon economy – and the minerals and metals required to make that shift – could affect fragility, conflict and violence dynamics in mineral-rich states”, reported the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) in 2018. A similar and simpler analysis was made by the EEB that year: “More mining leads to more fighting”. This is the reality that local communities and civil societies organisations are facing all around the world. Global Witness has even accounted mining as the main sector responsible for the killing of land and environmental defenders across the globe. This reality has been commonly associated with the Global South. Further evidence that the due diligence voluntary process, which is supported by the EU to guarantee responsible sourcing of metals, is far from useful in avoiding human rights violations.

Now, in the middle of the coronavirus crisis, Europe seeks to compensate its weaker commercial share, and to reinforce the aim to secure its supply,  with insourcing. Breton mentions that the Action Plan seeks to “protect our democracies against the menace of disinformation”, but at the same time points out that the major barrier to develop the insourcing is a lack of “public acceptance” in the European society to allow new mining projects to start operating. Therefore, several EC financed research projects have been looking for increasing “public acceptance” for this sector in local communities across the Union affected by proposed and/or operating extractive projects.

There is still no democratic capacity to decide by local communities nor their municipalities on the mining projects that will drastically change their land and very possibly leave tonnes of mining waste landfilled in their towns waiting. The discourse of the EC is that there is a lack of understanding of the mining sector by local communities and that there is a need to educate the European society on the current reality of the mining sector (a false mantra by the sector is that the environmental issues of mining and metallurgy are a matter of the past). This discourse which mixes the real needs of our planet with the demand for resources caused by the Commission’s plans for an ominous EU Green Deal will lead down the path where destruction of the environment, land and societal configurations, is forced through for Europe’s future.

“By building, today, the foundations of tomorrow’s autonomy, our Continent has the opportunity to establish a set of rules, infrastructures and technologies that will make it a powerful Europe, without ostracism or discrimination”, states Breton. This sentence provides an insight into the future the Commission is implementing in Europe. A “powerful Europe” directed by the few privileged ones living in the “civilized world” of Europe’s main cities enjoying access to green energy, but an inequality nightmare for local communities worldwide which will be affected by the increasing environmental, social and political issues on which the Green Empire will rely. To prevent this upcoming reality, today many organisations state “We can’t mine our way out of the climate crisis”.

You can find more articles from the Commodity Frontiers journal this op-ed was published in, here.

Profile

Alberto Vázquez Ruiz holds a MSc. in Conflict and Development (UGent, Belgium) and is specialized in topics related to mining and electronics. Since May 2018 he has been Project Coordinator at CATAPA (Belgium), researching on metal supply chains, on socio-environmental impacts of mining operations on local communities and on extractive waste in the EU.