COP29 spotlights critical minerals as African women count the cost

Members of the Women’s Climate Assembly (WCA) are seeking reparations for environmental and social damages inflicted by historic mining, and a greater say in the extraction of critical minerals needed for the world’s transition to clean energy.

“We support an energy transition, but if it will involve children in mines, we are against it, if it involves women getting sick and being exploited, we are against it,” Oumou Koulibaly, a WCA member based in Senegal, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

At October’s African Peoples Counter COP, activists shared experiences of the harmful impacts of mining, from communities displaced by new gold mines in Burkina Faso, to water contamination from Guinea’s aluminum mines.

Meanwhile in Baku on Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke following the conclusion of an expert panel on critical minerals.

“Too often we see the mistakes of the past repeated in a stampede of greed that crushes the poor,” he said.

“We see a rush for resources, with communities exploited, rights trampled and environments trashed. We see developing countries ground down to the bottom of value chains, as others grow wealthy on their resources,” Guterres said.

The panel published a report in September with recommendations to make the sector more sustainable, such as by creating a transparency framework and a fund to address legacy issues caused by derelict or abandoned mines.

Guterres said the report’s recommendations “aim to empower communities, create accountability, and ensure that clean energy drives equitable and resilient growth.”

Africa holds over 40% of the world’s reserves of transition minerals like cobalt, lithium and copper – all key to green technologies such as electric vehicles and solar panels.

With the right policies to keep more of the processing and manufacturing on the continent, Africa could boost its GDP by at least $24 billion a year and create 2.3 million jobs, research from civil society organization Publish What You Pay found.

As COP29 discusses what should happen, female activists in Africa want action so that history does not repeat itself, with minerals enriching international mining companies and local people left with little apart from environmental damage.

The African activists’ meeting and WCA said African voices have been largely excluded from COP meetings, where they said Global North governments and corporations renege on promises, such as not delivering climate funds where they are needed.

The WCA is working to quantify the historic damages in monetary terms and is building a legal case to demand reparations from polluting companies.

“We need to talk to the polluters for the problems they are causing in our communities,” said Abie Freeman a Liberia WCA member in a statement.

The “lungs of Africa”
In a declaration last year, the WCA criticized “world leaders of powerful countries who stand with their dirty industries”, highlighting the impacts of resource extraction like oil drilling and metals mining in the Congo Basin.

While the Congo Basin is extremely rich in minerals such as cobalt and coltan, it is also sometimes described as “the lungs of Africa” as its forests act as the world’s largest carbon sink.

Judith Suminwa Tuluka, the first female prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, said several reports link the intensive exploitation of minerals – including those for the energy transition – with war in her country.

“For an energy transition to be fair and equitable, it must be built on a foundation which contributes to peace and development,” she told the COP29 event.

That means those countries where resources are extracted and their local communities benefit from all of the measures and investments, Suminwa added.

The resources needed for green energy devices like solar panels and batteries will entail much more extraction of minerals such as cobalt and lithium, said Samantha Hargreaves, the director of WoMin, a Pan African ecofeminist alliance.

Africa should act as a unified bloc to control the mining and trade of critical minerals, she said, as mining projects have often left women with limited access to public services, water and energy, and vulnerable to sexual violence.

The United Nations Trade and Development agency (UNCTAD) contributed to the UN panel report and plans to work with countries to help obtain more community benefits from mining and build “value-added” industries like domestic processing.

Luz María de la Mora, director of UNCTAD’s Division on International Trade and Commodities said women have lower salaries in the sector, and often have to support families alone when men are forced to leave communities to find mining work.

“We need to make sure that the new era of critical energy transition minerals does not replicate the same kind of models that we have been seeing,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at COP29.

However, de la Mora warned this work will take time, including the creation of a legal regulatory framework that is binding for governments and companies.

“I think it starts with a good assessment. And this is where we are right now,” she said.