Inside the minerals underworld with UN researcher Tanya Wyatt

The boom for critical elements to power the energy transition has created opportunities for criminals

The energy transition has caused a global boom in demand for minerals. Lithium is vital to electric car batteries and energy storage, cobalt stabilises batteries, and several rare earth minerals are important components in things like wind turbines.

But this boom also risks creating a new extractive underworld. A new report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime warns of several emerging criminal activities linked to the mineral rush. As well as illegal mining, the report highlights cases of corruption, smuggling, money laundering and human rights abuses.

Tanya Wyatt, the organisation’s lead researcher on crimes that affect the environment, spoke to Wild Crime about the report’s findings and the crimes that are concerning her the most.

What is your role at the UNODC?

I have lots of different things I oversee, but one is the global analysis on crimes that affect the environment, which is a multi-part piece of research that’s looking at the landscape of criminalisation, and asking the question: when the environmental law is violated, when is it actually a crime or not? When do member states or countries actually have a criminal penalty in place for these types of violations?

Mineral mining is set to boom. Photo credit: En Adademic

I think it’s more criminalised than we would have expected. There’s a majority of countries that have at least one criminal penalty in place for the most serious kinds of violations. So I think there’s a good starting point there.

The second piece that we look at is forest crime. So illegal logging and illegal deforestation. And then we’ve had two publications out this year about what we’re calling minerals crime.

How has the global mineral rush created opportunities for criminals?

If you’ve watched any economic news lately you will have seen that gold is getting more and more valuable. So there is this incentive to illegally mine gold, which is one that’s a bit easier in terms of being able to do in a less technical way in terms of equipment. It’s also easier to smuggle.

And then I think both reports show it easily launders into a legal system. There’s really not that many countries in terms of gold or other metals and minerals that have the capacity to refine. And particularly in the case of gold, the global standard is near purity. And so you really have to have some sophistication to be able to do that. So it’s those places where it gets laundered into. And then it’s on a legal market.

Then with critical minerals, the conversation is mostly centred around the energy transition, trying to get off fossil fuels. We need nickel and cobalt and lithium and all these things to create the technologies.

I don’t think it should be overlooked, though, that these critical minerals are also used in the defence industry. So it is energy, but it’s also military equipment and space technology that needs all of these critical minerals.

There are opportunities for criminal infiltration. And it doesn’t look the same as gold. So we can’t just take what we’ve learned from gold or from the Kimberly process for diamonds and paste it on to what we’re doing with critical minerals.

It needs to be a much more context specific approach.

What were some of the criminal activities you found associated with critical minerals?

Corruption is key within all of these. Often at the licencing stage. So maybe you have government actors who are bribed to give licences to areas that actually shouldn’t be mined. Maybe that’s indigenous territory, protected areas or private areas, national parks. So mining is happening where it shouldn’t be because of corruption.

But you also have corruption in terms of changing the paperwork so that [a product] looks like it’s legal even though it’s come from an illegal space.

So it is this overlay of public corruption, but also private corruption, that you have companies that are involved in fraudulently producing this paperwork or knowing that we’ve been given a licence to go in and mine somewhere where they should be or take more than they’ve been allocated.

What environmental crime concerns you the most?