Evolving out of its 2017 report “The Growing Role of Minerals and Metals for a Low Carbon Future”, which found that the sought-after transition to a “low-carbon future will be significantly more mineral intensive than a business as usual scenario,” the World Bank developed its “Climate-Smart Mining” initiative, which ARPN discussed a few weeks ago.
Against this backdrop, earlier this month, representatives from public and private sectors from all over the world met in Washington, D.C. for the “Minerals for Climate Action” conference, to launch the World Bank’s “Climate-Smart Mining Facility.” This multi-donor trust fund has the stated goal of “help[ing] resource-rich developing countries benefit from the increasing demand for minerals and metals, while ensuring the mining sector is managed in a way that minimizes the environmental and climate footprint.”
According to the World Bank,
“[t]he Facility supports the sustainable extraction and processing of minerals and metals to secure supply for clean energy technologies by minimizing the social, environmental, and climate footprint throughout the value chain of those materials by scaling up technical assistance and investments in resource-rich developing countries.”
Initial support for the trust fund, which will support specific projects aimed at helping developing countries and emerging economies devise and implement “sustainable and responsible strategies and practices across the mineral value chain,” comes from the German government, as well as private sector companies Rio Tinto and Anglo American.
According to the World Bank’s press release, “[t]he Facility will also assist governments to build a robust policy, regulatory and legal framework that promotes climate-smart mining and creates an enabling environment for private capital.”
As followers of ARPN know from our Materials Science Profiles of Progress blog series , public-private partnerships are fueling the materials science revolution which is transforming the ways in which we use and obtain metals and minerals. In the context of the series, we have been featuring a number of domestic public-private partnerships develop practical solutions to critical minerals issues.
Seeing these types of partnerships further the goal of sustainably greening the future by responsibly harnessing metals and minerals on an international level is a welcome development, and we’ll be keeping tabs on the “Climate Smart Mining Initiative.”
