FRONTIERS explores frontiers along two dimensions: frontiers of sustainability governance; and frontiers for natural resource use and extraction for the green transition – with an emphasis on minerals, thereby advancing a third. Working across several aspects of social science and their application in a technical and natural scient context, we push the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research frontier for a comprehensively sustainable transition towards low-carbon societies. 

In FRONTIERS we take our point of departure in the environmental, social and wider eco-system impacts that are associated with land-based mining and a potential expansion into deep-sea mining. We examine practices among actors in the value chain to identify, prevent and otherwise manage harmful impacts in line with constantly developing expectations and normative requirements for risk-based due diligence as a management process for business enterprises, including investors, to ensure responsible business conduct. In this regard we pay particular attention to the practices of institutional investors and explore how these actors can shape the exploitation of minerals required for the green transition in such a way that harmful impacts on people and the environment are limited. In tandem with a push for the resource frontier for transition minerals to move into the deep sea, we wish to examine how the practices of institutional investors to cascade due diligence requirements and capacities along the investment value chain for transition minerals supply chains may contribute to shaping a comprehensive eco-system impact assessment for deep-sea mining. We add insights and theory from the emergent Rights of Nature regime in this regard, in order to ensure a comprehensive conception of the eco-system and examine the complex issue of how the interests of nature may be considered and represented in risk-based due diligence, sustainable finance, and exploration of minerals towards a just and fair transition. 

While dilemmas between a rapid and just green transition are recognized, the roles and complementarity of risk-based due diligence and Rights of Nature to proactively shape the transition minerals sector and its expansion to prevent social and environmental harm has attracted limited attention so far. Focusing on the role of institutional investors, this project explores that dual knowledge gap for the transition through four work packages work packages, with the research objective of identifying how institutional investors can shape transition mining, its territorial expansion and its impacts through risk-based due diligence, and how Rights of Nature arguments may add to this.