The transition to low-greenhouse-gas (GHG) economies generates a huge increase in demand for minerals for solar power panels, wind turbines and batteries for electric vehicles and other energy storage. Along with this comes a need for investments to enable the extensive expansion of energy generation sites and supplies of necessary raw materials, including minerals like manganese, lithium, cobalt, zink and copper.  

The construction of renewable energy production facilities and the expansion of transition minerals mining is often at odds with social and/or environmental sustainability in host areas, thereby challenging commitments to a just and fair transition that does not cause environmental harm and respects the human rights of affected communities.  

It is well established that land-based (terrestrial) minerals production often leads to undesired societal impacts. For example, mining operations and processing of ore into metals may cause contamination of land and water, which in turn may have detrimental effects for crops and fish, and the health and incomes of people living off the affected areas. Mining operations are also frequently associated with poor standards of occupational health and safety, as well as under-age workers, long working hours and low or uncertain incomes. The problems frequently affect already marginalized communities, whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous. Problems generally associated with mining are also prevalent in many of the areas where deposits of transition-relevant minerals are located or abundant. As the surge in need for transition-relevant minerals grows keeps pushing land-based resource exploitation into new areas, the risks of expanded harmful impacts also grow. These effects clash with the ideal of a just and fair transition in which the transition to low-GHG societies does not occur at the expense of particular and typically already vulnerable groups. Such effects also clash with the commitments of or requirements on as well as power companies, as well as many institutional investors. As the development of low-GHG energy not only requires concerted action by power companies but also large investments, the prevalence of risks or actual harmful societal effects can be detrimental to getting such business enterprises involved at the level required for a speedy transition. 

At the same time, a speedy transition including expansion of transition-relevant natural resource extraction requires extensive capital, which private institutional investors have been called upon to provide by the OECD, United Nations (UN), and the Danish government. Moreover, public regulators at national, regional (EU) and international (UN and OECD) levels are pushing responsible business conduct by adopted risk-based due diligence laws or guidance instruments. Risk-based due diligence presumes that business enterprises, including investors, have processes in place to identify and manage harmful impacts related to their own operations or those with which they are involved through business relations or investments. Hard-law requirements of risk-based due diligence are founded in soft-law guidance from the OECD and the United Nations (UN), namely the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises for Responsible Business Conduct (updated in 2023) and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights adopted in 2011. 

(It is uncertain at the time of writing if the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) will become adopted. However, risk-based due diligence along the value and investments chains for transition-relevant minerals is already relevant and required or at least expected of power companies and companies producing wind mills, photovoltaic (solar) or battery technologies and products.)  

A combination of the need for minerals, the desire to prevent harmful environmental and social impacts associated with land-based mining, and hopes for economic gains have led to an interest among some states and companies in exploring the feasibility of exploiting transition-relevant mineral deposits located at the bottom of the ocean in some in its deepest areas. So far, little is known of the potential impacts of deep-sea mining on the ocean eco-system and how they may impact communities on islands or in countries adjacent to potential deep-sea mining sites. While some nations and business enterprises are moving towards deep-sea mining, other nations and several investors and energy companies have responded to the push for advancing the resource frontier into the ocean by calling for a moratorium pending solid knowledge on the impacts on a fragile eco-system.  

The combination of hard and soft law sustainability governance requirements makes investors, such as Danish pension funds, potentially strong drivers of a transition that is just in taking account of rights, needs and concerns of people and the environment affected by transitions minerals mining, whether land- or sea-based.  

The evolving Rights of Nature (RoN) regime aims to protect the environment unable to speak for itself, thereby calling attention to the need to identify and take account of the impacts that human activities have on nature in a wide sense. The ideal of a just and fair transition ideal, risk-based (corporate sustainability) due diligence, and RoN, all aim at preventing harm to vulnerable entities.  

This provides the clue for FRONTIERS to examine how corporate sustainability due diligence, a rights-of-nature thinking, and pressure from institutional investors can shape mining for the transition to ensure respect of the interests and rights of affected communities and nature. Institutional investors have important roles to play as they are called upon to finance low-GHG energy production or the required access to minerals.