The G7’s critical minerals push promises a cleaner world, but the communities living above those minerals have heard this before
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On the shores of Lake Geneva last Wednesday, the leaders of the world’s seven largest economies wrapped up a summit that had, by most accounts, delivered more than expected.
The Évian G7, hosted by France from 15 to 17 June 2026, produced unified statements on Ukraine, endorsed the US–Iran nuclear memorandum, and committed to a multinational naval force in the Strait of Hormuz. But among the quieter declarations signed in the Alpine air was one that could reshape the physical world more profoundly than any of those headline moments: a formal commitment by G7 leaders to break China’s grip on critical minerals.
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The declaration, backed by €64 billion in announced investment, sets a target of reducing dependence on any single non-G7 supplier of rare earths and permanent magnets to below 60 per cent by 2030. A new coordination platform, working alongside the International Energy Agency, will monitor markets, share data and flag supply disruptions. It is, in the language of the summit, a plan to diversify.
The numbers
China currently refines roughly 90 per cent of the world’s rare earth elements and permanent magnets, controls around 70 per cent of global cobalt processing, and dominates the midstream production of at least 19 of the 20 minerals considered most strategically critical. When Beijing imposed export curbs on permanent magnets last year, it sent shockwaves through European and American defence, automotive, and renewables industries that had quietly allowed this dependency to deepen for decades.
The G7’s diagnosis is correct: dependency on a single state for the material foundation of the clean energy transition is a profound strategic vulnerability. And in a world where states are more likely to compete than collaborate as resources become more strained, this is an even greater concern. For the G7, then, the question is not whether diversification is necessary, but rather how it will be done and who will bear the cost.
Where the minerals actually are
The critical minerals the G7 needs are not buried beneath German farmland or Japanese mountain ranges. They are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Global South. The lithium triangle – Argentina, Bolivia, Chile – holds the majority of the world’s accessible lithium reserves. The Democratic Republic of Congo supplies more than 70 per cent of global cobalt. Indonesia and the Philippines hold vast nickel deposits. Sub-Saharan Africa is increasingly being identified as the next rare-earth frontier.
These are places, with rivers, farms, communities, ancestral territories, and living ecosystems. In the DRC, cobalt mining has been linked to the displacement of farming communities, severe water and soil contamination, and, in the artisanal sector, to child labour. In Chile’s Atacama, lithium extraction is drawing down ancient brine aquifers that Indigenous Atacameño communities depend on for water and spiritual life. In Indonesia, nickel smelting has driven deforestation across islands whose biodiversity rivals the Amazon.
The scramble for cobalt in the Congo echoes the rubber extraction of the Belgian colonial era. The rush for the lithium triangle recalls the nitrate wars that scarred the Atacama in the nineteenth century, when external powers determined the fate of distant territories based entirely on their own industrial needs. The power structures remain the same, even as the materials change.
The Évian Declaration mentions development finance institutions, export credit agencies, and private-sector investment. It does not mention community consent. It does not mention environmental review timelines. It does not mention benefit-sharing with the societies that sit atop the resources the G7 needs. The urgency of this declaration is likely to compress the very processes – environmental impact assessments, indigenous consultation, community benefit negotiations – that might distribute the gains more equitably, leaving countries like Peru and the DRC as exporters of raw or semi-processed materials, receiving a fraction of the final value.
What a different approach might look like
The Évian declaration isn’t without some merits. The commitment to recycling critical minerals, aiming for a ‘significant share’ of annual G7 consumption from recovered materials by 2030, is important and welcomed. Recycling reduces the total volume of extraction required and begins to decouple the clean energy economy from its dependence on particular territories.
However, recycling is not sufficient on its own. The communities living above the lithium and the cobalt deserve to be in the room when supply chain deals are struck. Meaningful consultation, genuine revenue-sharing, and environmental safeguards must be embedded in trade agreements, not bolted on as conditions afterwards. This would mark a real departure from the colonial template the declaration presently points towards.
The G7 is right that the current situation is unsustainable. But trading Chinese dominance for a G7 carve-up of the same Global South territories is not diversification. It is relocation. Until the people of the Atacama, the Congo Basin, and the nickel islands of Southeast Asia have a voice in the deals being made in their name, declarations like the one signed at Évian will keep repeating the oldest pattern in the book, just with a greener colour scheme.
