On the 9th of October 2025, the IRP report on Financing the Responsible Supply of Energy Transition Minerals for Sustainable Development will be released.
On that date, you will find the report here.
The report will be presented on 9th of October at the UNEP event ‘Advancing the Environment Principles of the UN Secretary General’s Panel on CETM: Dialogue on Making Mineral Value Chain Transparency Work for People and Planet’.
The report examines the prospective future demand for a subset of minerals and metals, called in this report ‘transition minerals’, such as cobalt, copper, nickel, lithium, and manganese, that is particularly important to the transition away from fossil fuels.
Supplying these transition minerals at the scale envisaged will require a substantial increase in investment in the mining and processing industries. However, if this growth in mining is implemented according to current mainstream practices, it will result in considerable social and environmental damage, negatively affecting the local communities and environment where the mines are located.
The report focuses on how the financing of the extraction of these minerals should be reformed to help bring about their environmentally and socially responsible production, and the equitable distribution of the resulting financial and other economic and social benefits. The report explores the scale of the challenge, in terms of both increasing the supply of primary metals, and the need to manage the demand for them through circular economy approaches and resource efficiency policies. Finally, it describes how ‘sustainable finance’ combined with ‘responsible mining’ could lead to the emergence of a mining industry that contributes to the sustainable development of local communities and countries that host the mines, and the countries that import them for their low-carbon technologies, as envisaged by the Sustainable Development Licence to Operate (SDLO, IRP 2020).