Critical minerals could save or destabilise the Arctic

A few weeks ago, students from my “International Relations of the Arctic” class at Sciences Po invited me to speak at a TEDx conference they organised on campus. The prompt for speakers was “batteries not included”. I had a lot of fun putting the talk together. The video won’t be out for a few months, but I’d like to share a revised transcript with you here.

A few years ago, scientists in the Arctic recorded a remarkable pattern. Parts of the Arctic Ocean are becoming warm enough to melt sea ice from below. Not from the sun hitting the ice above, but from the warming ocean water itself. In the past decades, the average temperature of the Arctic has already risen roughly three to four times faster than the global average. And the polar north is still heating up faster than any other area of our planet.

In the Arctic itself, the impacts of climate change are already undermining ecological stability, harming local communities, and changing long-established patterns of life. But the impacts of Arctic warming are not confined to the region. They reverberate across the entire planet. This is not a distant problem, but one that is already shaping our immediate future.

For example, the amount of sea ice that survives the Arctic summer season is currently declining by about twelve percent per decade. The Arctic Ocean could see its first ice-free summer as early as the 2030s, squarely within the lifetime of most people reading this post.

This has far-reaching effects on other parts of the Earth, because Arctic sea ice helps regulate its climate, influences global weather patterns, and affects ocean circulations. Unless global greenhouse gas emissions are reduced rapidly, the negative consequences of a melting Arctic will continue to spread. Even regions located thousands of kilometres to the south will have to deal with rising sea levels, shifting temperature and rainfall patterns, and more extreme weather events. There may therefore be no clearer symbol of why we urgently need to counteract climate change than the Arctic.

Because as Arctic ice disappears, one of the planet’s most important climate-stabilising mechanisms weakens. So, from the point of view of protecting the Arctic — and with it our climate, food security, or even our coastal cities — surely we should accelerate the only solution we know can halt global warming: A shift from fossil-based systems of energy production and consumption, including oil, natural gas and coal, to renewable energy sources.

The answer is yes, but with one important caveat.

On the one hand, the Arctic reminds us of why a global transition to renewable energies is needed as fast as possible. The consequences of unbridled climate collapse and a destroyed Arctic would be globally destabilising and extremely dangerous.

But, on the other hand, the Arctic also serves as a bellwether for some of the political pitfalls we might encounter during this transition. Like other high-stakes economic transformations, the green revolution has political ramifications, and introduces a risk of conflict.

To stay with the theme of this conference, the batteries powering the global green transition are not included. We have to build them ourselves. And that means mining the materials they are made of.

Moving away from our dependency on the physical components of the fossil fuel era, like oil, gas and coal, is clearly unavoidable. But the low-carbon economy of the future will also rely on physical materials, although of a different kind. A decline in fossil fuel dependence may reduce some forms of geopolitical competition, but it will not eliminate resource politics altogether.

Key technologies of the green transition, such as batteries, solar panels, or wind turbines, simply cannot be produced at scale without a massive surge in the production of certain metals and minerals. A single electric car battery can require tens of kilograms of nickel, copper, and lithium, materials that must be mined, transported, refined, and assembled across multiple continents.

Skyrocketing demand

Global demand for key minerals and rare earths is therefore predicted to skyrocket in the coming decades. According to the International Energy Agency, it will nearly triple by 2030 and grow to over four times the current levels by 2050.

Now, this would perhaps not in itself be too much of a hurdle, were it not for the fact that global mineral supply chains have become an increasingly contested part of international relations.

In recent years, states around the world have begun to view critical minerals not in terms of economic objectives, but through the lens of their national security. This is not because these materials are always inherently rare. To the contrary, many of them are abundant in the Earth’s crust.

But once mined, most minerals and metals must be refined before they can be processed into usable products. And most of the world’s refinement capacities for critical minerals and rare earths are concentrated in a small number of countries, especially China. In fact, China is the dominant refiner for 19 out of 20 critical minerals tracked by the International Energy Agency.

Bargaining chips

Other states increasingly fear that this one-sided dependency could be weaponised. And indeed, international supply chains have already become bargaining chips in geopolitical competition, especially during trade wars between the world’s two biggest powers, China and the United States. Many countries are therefore now looking for solutions closer to home to solve the resulting conundrum. And in doing so, many of them are turning north, to the Arctic.

The reason for that is that the Arctic could soon become a critical minerals powerhouse. A 2024 report by the Arctic Economic Council states that the Arctic is home to 31 out of the 34 materials identified as essential for technologies like renewable energy installations and electric vehicle batteries. Three-quarters of the critical raw materials listed in the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act are already being extracted in the Arctic.

There is massive untapped potential for Arctic mining, as many of the region’s deposits still remain to be explored, but are expected to be large. The Arctic states — the United States, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Denmark through Greenland, but also Russia — are therefore now scrambling to finance and open new mines, and build the infrastructure needed to support them. Their objective is to harness the mineral wealth of the Arctic to supply the world with the materials it needs for the green energy transition.

So, why would this be a problem? After all, we need minerals, and the Arctic states seem ready to supply them from their very own territories.

The issue is that, at the same time as Arctic states are rushing to exploit mineral deposits, their region is emerging as a new frontier of militarised security competition. And minerals are increasingly becoming caught up in that dynamic. Across the Arctic, something notable is happening. Mines are being planned in the same places that are being fortified by militaries. The defining resource policy problem of our century is merging with a regional security crisis.

For one thing, Russia, which controls more than half of the Arctic coastline, launched a war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022. This has brought about an increasingly tense standoff with the remaining seven Arctic states, all of which are NATO members. Military exercises in the region are large and frequent, and the risk of an armed conflict breaking out in the Arctic is no longer negligible.

Global interest

The melting sea ice is also opening new shipping routes through the Arctic, which attracts the interest of outsiders from around the world. China, which declared itself a near-Arctic state in 2018, has worked hard to assert itself in the region. Ambitious Arctic mining plans are therefore no longer being implemented in a politically harmless environment.

In Russia, for example, the government has moved to boost Arctic mining through state-directed investments. Moscow now pins the future of its economic model not only on gas and oil, but also on minerals and rare earths extracted in the north. Its official Arctic strategy defines the region as a crucial resource base. Russia has modernised its military assets in the Arctic, in part to be able back up its claims to important deposits both at land and at sea.

Across the European Arctic, mining expansion is unfolding in a region that is also becoming more strategically important due to a possible threat from Russia.

In the Arctic Ocean, national claims to large swathes of seabed, which offer the potential for deep sea mining, are being staked in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Norway even opened parts of its continental shelf to potential seabed mineral extraction and launched the first licensing process. But Russia, China and the U.S. are disagreeing over whether America, which has not ratified UNCLOS, has the legitimacy to stake a claim. This is a problem, because the division of the Arctic seabed in the end remains a political process reliant on the good faith of major powers.

Strategic warehouse

And perhaps most crucially, U.S. President Trump has threatened to bring the island of Greenland under American control, citing rare earth and mineral deposits, which the U.S. wants to keep out of the reach of Chinese companies. It’s easy to dismiss headlines about “buying Greenland” as an anomaly. But they are actually a symptom, a signal that the world’s great powers have begun to view the Arctic first and foremost as a strategic warehouse.

What we are seeing in the Arctic, therefore, is a growing tendency by states to enmesh their attempts to escape a critical minerals dependency with emerging and unstable patterns of security competition. Instead of being viewed as a technical issue and a problem of international cooperation, the question of Arctic mining is being turned into an issue that allegedly requires a military response.

More states than ever before see their Arctic mining activities as a zero sum game, deposits as something to be protected, and global mineral markets as a source of risk as opposed to a part of the solution to climate change. The problem with this approach is that it is ultimately self-defeating.

For one thing, mining and processing are capital- and technology-intensive industries. Mines require substantial supporting infrastructure, large-scale investments, and potential decades of risk-tolerance and political commitment. Securitising mines, and militarising their surroundings, makes such long-term commitments less likely to endure.

Militarised competition over resources would also harm local communities, especially Indigenous ones, when they should instead be the first to benefit from new economic activity. It would fragment supply chains, trigger a regulatory race to the bottom, and remove the legitimacy of mining projects in the eyes of local communities, promising control, but producing instability instead.

But most importantly, perhaps, securitisation gives rise to a paradox. The materials needed to save the Arctic may become the reason the Arctic becomes more unstable.

But it does not have to be this way.

The green transition will not succeed through militarised competition over strategic minerals. It will require cooperation over supply chains, infrastructure, refinement technologies, the responsible use of shared resources, and appropriate norms of extraction that consider and integrate local communities, especially Indigenous folks.

The Arctic shows us two truths at once. It shows us why the transition to renewable energy is unavoidable. And it shows us why that transition must be managed politically, not just technically. A binding multilateral treaty, or a global minerals trust, are ideas that are already being discussed within the UN. Either could be a good place to start. Because the ultimate risk to any country involved is not the loss of sovereign control over mineral deposits, but the possible failure of the green transition, which must be implemented as fast as possible.

A slowdown of this process for any reason, including mutual mistrust, lack of international cooperation, or the outbreak of conflict, would be a catastrophe affecting everyone. It must absolutely be avoided.

Many Arctic communities already know this. This is the main reason why they are open for business. The natural environment of Arctic regions offers clean, affordable and abundant energy sources for processing and smelting, such as hydropower and geothermal energy. Actors like Greenland are already world leaders in sustainable approaches to mining. Their rulebooks are setting some of the strongest standards in the world on how to balance the need for more minerals with the environmental, social and cultural requirements of the places and people that produce them.

To solve the paradoxes of the green transition, we have to listen to people from the Arctic. Because they understand what is at stake, the solutions they offer deserve to be heard by the rest of us.

This is a reproduction of an article that first appeared on 66° North. Any opinions expressed in it are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Arctic Today. If you would like to read more posts by Lukas Wahden, you can sign up for his blog on Substack here.

Lukas Wahden is a PhD candidate in International Relations at SciencesPo Paris and Associate Fellow with the Russia Program at George Washington University. He mostly writes about Russia, the poles, oceans and space.