Conference Agenda

Current policies and initiatives for the transition towards a decarbonized future largely lean on the replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy sources and the rapid electrification of transport and industry. While these technologies will most likely effectively reduce carbon emissions, they will also lead to a dramatic increase in the demand for particular minerals, such as lithium, cobalt, copper and rare earth elements. The availability and supply of these so-called critical minerals is therefore increasingly acknowledged as a major bottleneck for the energy transition, urging (mainly Western) governments and corporations to find ways to secure access to these resources.

In this paper, I propose that critical minerals should not only be understood as a ‘material bottleneck’ for the energy transition, but also as an issue that implies fundamental questions of justice. Most reserves of critical minerals are located in the Global South, were their extraction is widely associated with tremendous environmental impacts, growing inequalities, social conflicts and ill-development. When mineral demand will grow threefold or even sevenfold, this will push new commodity frontiers and mining projects ever further into the resource-rich regions of the Global South. Here, they concomitantly redraw landscapes and life-worlds in ways that reproduce global and local colonial relations, curtailing a truly just global energy transition.

This presentation aims to explore the impacts and questions of climate justice that arise from the demand for critical minerals through a case-study of the Ecuadorian Amazon. In this region, oil reserves are on decline but copper mining is booming. In this context, I will map the spatial and socio-ecological implications of the mining frontier. Drawing on literature on critical geography and green colonialism, I will analyze the power structures and (racial) injustices that undergird the ways in which mineral extracting unfolds in this region. Lastly, I will explore the ways in which people and collectives across the Ecuadorian Amazon are imagining and putting into practice pathways to both decarbonize and decolonialize our future. With this I aim contribute critical insights to both academic and societal search for a truly just global energy transition.

Historically used as an industrial lubricant, a fixing agent for ceramics, a treatment for bipolar disorder, and a coolant for nuclear fusion, lithium has recently emerged as a “critical metal” whose role in the production of lithium-ion batteries is quickly re-shaping the political economy of extraction and development for a low carbon energy transition. However, concerns have been raised that soaring prices, public subsidies, and growing demand for batteries and electric vehicles are fuelling a model of extraction that is quickly degrading some of the world’s most fragile ecosystems and communities. This paper explores the transnational forces that are driving and governing the contemporary surge in demand for the world’s lightest metal. It makes the case that transnational mechanisms for governing renewable energy are embedded in a multilateral system that has systematically prioritized the energy needs of western capitalist economies over commodity-bearing frontiers. However, unlike oil or uranium, the securitization of lithium has occurred in a context of deep global integration that exposes battery and EV manufacturers to the uncertainties of transnational manufacturing and the reputational risks of selling a product that is associated with degrading lives, livelihoods, and the living world. The paper makes the case that voluntary standards and third party certification schemes have been used as “proxies” for managing the reputational risks of extracting surplus from lithium frontiers. However, by circumventing public systems of authority and accountability, their ability to regulate and mitigate the harmful effects of lithium extraction remains limited, and light.

Recent scholarship underlines the importance of analysing the nature and impact of anticipatory visions and processes in earth system governance (Burch et al 2019). Projections of the future are especially critical in relation to climate change governance. However, as scholars in science and technology studies (e.g., Beck and Mahony 2017) have shown, climate scenarios and pathways circumscribe the future along particular directions while effectively foreclosing others. Anticipations of the future may also work in less explicit, but nonetheless powerful, ways that ‘lock-in’ (Leach et al 2012) specific climate solutions that come to be taken for granted as the obvious way forward. In this paper, we seek to extend these insights to mainstream frameworks for a ‘just transition’.

At first sight, arguments for just transitions in the course of decarbonisation promise to marry traditionally technical perspectives with a concern for inequality and social justice. For example, electric vehicles (EVs) are being imagined not just as a matter of changing one type of car for another, but as a mechanism to promote equity in access to ‘clean mobility’ (Syal 2023). Yet, this scenario of the future renders invisible the politics and socio-environmental impacts of resource extraction – notably, of nickel - on which EVs rely (Dall-Orsoletta et al 2022).

The paper’s central objective is to address this gap by examining how nickel-based decarbonisation practices and discourses for EVs are designed, implemented, and contested and their implications for future mobilities. Drawing on documentary analysis conducted as part of the ANU UNESCO Chair in Science Communication for Public Good, we explore the ways in which imaginations of the future shape the work of key actors across nickel commodity chains and legitimise or challenge EV agendas. We aim to unpack power dynamics and social disparities along these chains in Indonesia which is responsible for the bulk of global nickel extraction. This will deepen our understandings of how particular models of the decarbonised economy and transformative sustainability are being imagined, anticipated, and pursued, and how particular social and environmental (in)justices are accepted and normalised. Our analysis highlights the limitations of framing justice in ‘just transitions’ as “a formalised and preconceived ‘thing’ to be delivered or applied” (Velicu and Kaika, 2017, p. 305). Instead, we argue that such anticipatory visions of just transition must engage with the conflicting dynamics of everyday power, precarity, and the inherently cross-scalar nature of earth system governance.

The Amazon biome is comprised of nine countries and represents a third of the remaining tropical forests, storing around 20% of all carbon in the world's terrestrial vegetation (Baccini et al., 2012). In the Brazilian part of the forest, at least 27% of this carbon is found in Indigenous Lands (ILs) (Walker et al., 2020). These ILs combined host over 173 distinct indigenous ethnic groups, totaling 87 million hectares, equivalent to the territories of France and Germany combined (Crisostomo et al., 2015). These ILs have distinct sociocultural characteristics, and thanks to the organization and actions of indigenous peoples, they have the lowest rates of deforestation and degradation compared to other types of properties in the Amazon (Nolte et al., 2013). From 2000 to 2014, the forest loss in these areas was less than 2%, while the average in the entire Amazon region was 19% (Crisostomo et al., 2015).

With the expansion of "Nature-Based Solutions" and the subsequent escalation of voluntary carbon markets, pressure for the implementation of REDD+ projects in ILs has been growing. Proponents argue that such projects are essential for mitigating the climate crisis. They also argue that REDD+ can finance not only the preservation of carbon in forests but also the autonomous development of indigenous communities, valuing culture, sustainability, and territorial governance (Hacon, 2018, p. 127; p. 169). However, in practice, this promise hides problems and contradictions, including violations of indigenous socio-territorial rights (Kill et al., 2015; Bonilha, 2014).

At this moment there is no hegemonic position on REDD+ among Amazonian indigenous movements. Some groups advocate that safeguards can be established for the mechanism, allowing funding for indigenous territorial governance that guarantees autonomy, development, and territorial protection. An example of this is the "Amazonian Indigenous Redd+ (AIR)" proposal (COICA, 2014). Other organizations have strongly criticized REDD+, pointing out its neoliberal and expropriatory character. They point out that it is a form of "climate colonialism" that will lead to the loss of autonomy and violations of indigenous socio-territorial rights (Declaration of Xapuri, 2017). Centered on the perspective of indigenous organizations and taking the right to autonomy and self-determination as an analytical element, the research seeks to present an overview of the current debate in the Brazilian Amazon.