Minerals and Energy

The current model of economic globalisation is driving unprecedented demand for the world’s remaining resources including oil, gas, coal and minerals. This demand is combined with ever more advanced technological methods of extracting and refining these resources from locations where they were previously deemed inaccessible, often with hugely detrimental environmental and social impacts. While global demand for oil and gas continues to grow, and revenues of the world’s largest mining companies are hitting record levels, there is also a new boom in the demand for certain minerals (referred to as transition minerals or critical minerals) required for the transition away from fossil fuel. This is further accelerating the expansion of the mining and energy sectors, with vast areas of land being acquired for the generation of renewable energy through wind and solar energy farms, geothermal energy plants, or hydroelectric dams, and for the extraction of minerals such as lithium and nickel for batteries to power electric vehicles, electronic devices and to store energy.

Why is this relevant to indigenous peoples and to forest peoples?

From the commencement of the colonial era to the present-day, mining, and subsequently energy generation, have had a devastating impact on indigenous peoples and forest peoples globally. Those harms have never been properly acknowledged, let alone remedied, despite these extractive industry sectors being recognised by United Nations bodies as “accounting for most allegations of the worst abuses, up to and including complicity in crimes against humanity … and a board array of abuses in relation to … especially indigenous peoples”. As a result, for many indigenous peoples and forest peoples these sectors continue to be associated with the denial of rights, displacement, destruction of place and ways of life and livelihoods, desecration of sacred sites and contamination of precious ecosystems that provide the basis for their lives and identity.

Some estimate that in the region of 50% of the world's remaining minerals are located in indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ territories. The continued refusal of the major mining and oil and gas companies to respect these peoples’ foundational self-determination and free prior and informed consent rights in contexts where States have all too often not enacted legislation to give effect to them or to protect indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ ancestral land and resource rights, means that despite improved corporate social responsibility policies, projects continue to be imposed upon these peoples and land rights defenders resisting them face criminalisation, violence and at times death.  

Even the most isolated and vulnerable indigenous peoples and forest peoples are profoundly threatened by this unabated advancement of the extractive industry frontier. Ironically, the global rush to extract the minerals needed for the transition to renewable energies is replicating and compounding the profound and unremedied harms that indigenous peoples and forest peoples have experienced at the hands of the extractive sectors since colonial times.