What good is a pledge without the metal to build it?

COP30 opened in Belém this week with Brazil unveiling its roadmap to scale climate finance to $1.3 trillion annually by 2035. With countries submitting new Nationally Determined Contributions and the "Baku to Belém" pathway being finalised, the whole machinery of climate diplomacy has draped over the Amazon with a renewed urgency around implementation.

And yet, amidst the ambitious plans, critical components like copper seemed to be the one guest not seated at the main negotiating table.

Brazil's finance roadmap is comprehensive, politically savvy, and structurally sound. It also wrongly assumes that the materials required to deliver these investments will simply materialise when needed. Sadly, they won’t.

The International Energy Agency projects that meeting Paris Agreement targets – which would involve massive electrification efforts around the world - requires lithium demand to increase fivefold by 2040, while nickel and graphite need to double. Cobalt and rare earth elements must grow by 50 to 60 percent. Copper, the backbone of electrification, faces what the IEA calls a "particularly concerning" supply gap driven by declining ore grades, rising extraction costs, and a sharp slowdown in new discoveries.

Current supply projections show deficits across every critical mineral category. Market concentration has worsened, not improved, with the top three producers now controlling 77% of mining – up from 73% in 2020. Refining is even more concentrated at 86%, with China alone accounting for 90% of growth in processing capacity over the past decade.

The revolt of the resource-holders

This week in Belém marks a turning point. For the first time in three decades of climate negotiations, producer countries are demanding that mineral governance be treated as a core element of climate action rather than a technical afterthought.

During the opening sessions on Monday, 10 November, more than 200 civil society organisations signed an open letter calling on governments to place transition minerals at the centre of negotiations. They are proposing the “Belém Action Mechanism,” a new institutional framework under the UNFCCC to coordinate mineral governance, technology transfer, and value addition in resource-rich countries.

The G77 and China (which, despite the name, currently represents 134 developing countries), submitted a formal request earlier this week for a "dedicated dialogue" on energy transition minerals. Their language is direct: the current system "presents a serious risk of entrenching unsustainable development trajectories, undermining efforts toward industrial diversification, and jeopardising the prospects of a truly just transition for developing countries."

African nations arrived in Belém with a unified position. The continent holds some of the world's richest deposits of lithium, cobalt, and manganese. However, it also captures less than 2% of the value in global mineral supply chains. Following their second Climate Summit in September, African heads of state are now calling for binding commitments on domestic processing before export, mandatory technology transfer, and climate finance specifically appropriated for processing infrastructure. While South America’s Colombia has proposed establishing "no-go zones" for mining in ecologically critical areas, South Africa and Uganda have demanded fairer value distribution. Zimbabwe has integrated mineral governance into its national COP30 agenda. By midweek, it was clear this represents a coordinated push from the countries that hold the resources the energy transition depends on.

The resistance from industrialised nations has been swift. Acknowledging material constraints would require admitting that current climate targets are undeliverable without a fundamental restructuring of how extraction is operated. Western countries are working to keep mineral supply chains in the realm of technical implementation discussions rather than political negotiation. The UNFCCC has never formally recognised mineral governance as part of climate action, and powerful delegations want to keep it that way.

What has emerged instead is a patchwork of bilateral deals and strategic partnerships designed to secure access without addressing governance. The $8.5 billion U.S.-Australia rare earths partnership announced earlier this year is geopolitics, not climate policy. Similarly, the G7 Critical Minerals Production Alliance, launched in October, is about countering China, not ensuring equitable transitions.

The result is a system where producer countries bear the costs while consuming countries capture the value — same old, same old. Africa holds 30% of global mineral reserves, but processes almost none of them domestically. The Democratic Republic of Congo supplies 70% of the world's cobalt under conditions marked by child labour, displacement, and armed conflict. Investors are very happy to invest hundreds of millions in the Lobito Atlantic Railway — a vital artery for extracting these critical minerals — but working on genuine accountability and helping the DRC end child labour isn't treated with the same urgency.

The numbers make the problem clear. The UAE Consensus from COP28 committed countries to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. Delivering that target requires an estimated 50 million additional tonnes of copper over the next 15 years, but current global production sits at roughly half that amount, and new mine development timelines run seven to ten years in most jurisdictions.

Even if every proposed copper project came online tomorrow, supply would still fall short. Permitting delays, community opposition, financing gaps, and technical constraints all compound the shortfall. The same dynamic applies to lithium, nickel, cobalt, and rare earths. Demand is accelerating faster than supply can respond — it may even accelerate faster than supply can ever respond.

This is a structural mismatch between climate ambition and material reality. The energy transition will require more mining, not less, and faster permitting. Pretending otherwise does not make the problem disappear; it just ensures that extraction happens under worse conditions than it otherwise would: child labour, modern slavery, pollution, and trafficking.

COP30 is being framed as the "implementation COP," where pledges turn into action. If that claim is to mean anything, then mineral governance cannot remain a blind spot. The Belém Action Mechanism offers a pathway, and the UN panel report provides a framework. What seems to be missing is concrete political will from the countries whose targets depend most heavily on minerals they do not control.

COP30 will determine whether minerals move from the margins of climate negotiations to the centre. If they do, the energy transition has a chance of being both rapid and just. If they remain an afterthought, then all the finance roadmaps and NDC pledges in the world will not change the fact that we are building a decarbonised future on the same exploitative foundations that created the climate crisis in the first place.

What good is a pledge without the metal to build it? Belém is where we find out if anyone has an answer.

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Sources

International Energy Agency, Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025; Climate Action Network International, Open Letter to UNFCCC Parties, October 2025; Natural Resource Governance Institute; UN Secretary-General's Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals, July 2025; G77 and China submission to UNFCCC Response Measures Forum, September 2025; African Climate Summit II Joint Communiqué, September 2025; USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2024