FRONTIERS explores frontiers along two dimensions: frontiers of sustainability governance; and frontiers for natural resource use and extraction for the green energy transition – with an emphasis on minerals, thereby advancing the research frontier on just and fair transitions. Working across several aspects of social science and their application in a technical and natural science 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 (DSM). We examine practices among actors in the transition minerals value chain to identify, prevent and otherwise manage harmful impacts in line with constantly developing expectations and regulatory requirements for risk-based due diligence as a management process for business enterprises to ensure responsible business conduct. We pay particular attention to the renewable energy sector, mining companies, organisations along with transition minerals value chains, and institutional investors. We explore how these actors can shape the exploration and exploitation of minerals required for the green energy transition in such a way that harmful impacts on people and the environment are limited, and that conflicts around transition minerals or other natural resources deployed for the energy transition may be reduced.

Prompted by a rising push for the resource frontier for transition minerals to move into the deep sea, we explore and analyse how elements of good practices of the mining/minerals and energy industries and institutional investors towards cascading due diligence requirements and capacities along the transition minerals production, procurement or investment value chains, may contribute to shaping a comprehensive eco-system impact assessment for DSM. We do not negate the huge body of research and reports on poor practices, but by turning the lens to good practice seek to contribute to operational ways forward at a time when the market for transition minerals continues to rise along with concerns and insights on harmful impacts.

We will add insights and theory from the emergent Rights of Nature regime, in order to advance 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, mining, and sustainable finance towards a just and fair transition. By doing so, we aim to go beyond the somewhat technical understanding of environment or social sustainability that sometimes shape conventional impact assessment and contribute to developing a comprehensive approach that accounts more holistically for ecosystemic impacts in the ocean and on land.