Renewable energy solutions to achieve climate targets require mined materials such as copper, nickel, iron ore, cobalt and lithium. However, little is known about the biodiversity impacts of mining the three billion tons of raw materials needed for a clean energy future.

In their new paper, Stefan Giljum, Sebastian Luckeneder and Victor Maus from the WU Institute for Ecological Economics, together with their colleagues, propose four key steps to align global climate, mining and biodiversity conservation goals: increase efforts to mitigate mining impacts, identify and protect the sites most important for biodiversity conservation, close and restore fossil fuel sites, and reduce the demand for high-impact minerals. While these actions could provide a broad range of other environmental and social benefits, implementing them collectively is essential to shift away from the current trajectory of long-term biodiversity loss.

The paper has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2307006120.