So, we'd like to welcome you to our debate. My name is Ifa Braden, I'm with Geological Survey Ireland and on behalf of myself and Professor Nick Garn from University of Grenoble, my co-convener for this session. We'd like to welcome you. Our debate is managing our mineral resources for a sustainable future and the role of earth scientists. So, I'll just briefly share the format of today's meeting with you. So, we will have a short introduction to the topic. We'll also have a quick poll just to get a sense of your, from the audience perspective, what your views on mineral resources and what are the kind of primary aspects of exploration that we need to be looking at. And then I'll introduce the speakers. We will have a short discussion and questions and answers session and then the results of our poll. Can I just remind people to please submit your questions through the questions and answer panel in the bottom center of the screen. These will be submitted and we'll have a look as many as possible and put these questions to the panelists. There is also the chat option available for comment, but if you have questions for the speakers, please submit them through the questions and answers panel. Can I also just thank our supporting project, the Pacific Project, which is an EU funded project looking specifically at sustainable and more environmental ways of exploring for mineral resources. So, I'm sure I'm wondering what the Pacific logo is. So, just to give a little bit of introduction to the topic and some context for today's debate, we've been looking at this topic in the context of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and just a little clarification maybe for a couple of things. We only have an hour today to debate the topic. So, maybe just to remind people of what we mean when we're talking about sustainable practices and mining. Sometimes there's some confusion when people hear the word sustainable mining. It usually refers to sustainable practices and this can be anything from having better environmental controls and environmental protection at mining sites and during exploration base. It can also be things like introducing electric vehicles for plant and machinery on site, maintaining water courses properly. So, there are a lot of individual practices that we can have and from the geologist's perspective, it can also include really looking at the or better, more efficient mining, efficient mining practices and so on. So, we're talking about sustainable practices in mining rather than suggesting that this is any kind of renewable resource. We're also talking about minerals in the general context and that includes those used for energy storage. So, for example, cobalt and lithium for batteries, materials that are needed for renewable energy technologies, but we're not really going to touch on things like fossil fuels and coal and so on, more to do with the limit of an hour debate online than anything else. And we also wanted to remind people to be cognizant that when we're talking about mining, we're talking about a range of different types of mining throughout the planet. So, that can be anything from artisanal mining and local small-scale mining to very large multinational companies. It can range from clean and responsible mining to, we've all seen examples of environmental hazardous mining for minerals and equally from exploitative practices to those that are in fact locally and regionally beneficial. So, we'd ask you to just bear in mind that there's quite a range of mine and mining practices involved. So, if we can have our poll, we'd ask you to just have a quick look at this question. You can only select one answer, so we would ask you to think about what should be the most important factor when deciding to improve a mining project. So, we'll just give a quick introduction to our speakers for today. First up, we have Dr Karen Hangloy, who is the Director of the British Geological Survey since last year. She has a Master's and PhD in Geology from the University of Copenhagen and has also been a research scientist at Columbia University and Woods Hole and recently was awarded an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University. Karen brings extensive experience in business and academic research, which includes senior roles in the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and in the EIT raw materials in Europe and her international experience in science and innovation includes the future of resources, sustainability, digitization, and new ways of working. Then we have Professor Celine Malli, who is the Director of the Minerals, Materials and Society Program and the Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of Energy in the Environment at the University of Delaware. He's also a Senior Fellow at Columbia University's Center for Sustainable Investment. His background is in Chemistry from Tufts University with then a Master's in Environmental Law and Policy from Yale University and a Doctorate in Environmental Planning from MIT. He was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011 and has also served on the United Nations International Resource Panel and the Science Panel for the Global Environment Facility, which is one of the world's largest multinational trust funds for the environment which is held in trusteeship by the World Bank. We then have Andy Whitmore, who is currently Freelance Contractor and Working as Financial Advocacy Officer for DeepSea Mining Campaign. He has an MA in Development Studies from School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London and is the Editor and Author of Pitfalls and Pipelines, Indigenous People and the Extractive Indices and is co-author of Indigenous Peoples and the Extractive Industries Towards Right-Respecting Engagement. He's worked on the issue of mining and affected communities and has been a founder of the Mine What Collective since the 1980s. He also helped to found the London Mining Network where he has coordinated EU projects and is also currently the Chair of that network and he's been coordinator of Indigenous Peoples' Link and Managing Editor of Mines and Communities website and has spoken on similar topics at events including the 2015 International Conference on Peoples and Mining in the Philippines. And finally we have Dr. Patrick Redmond who is a professional scientist for the last 25 years with experience in international mineral exploration and mining industry. He's currently the Vice President for Exploration with Cold Metals, which is a private minerals exploration company investing in battery materials and projects across the globe. He's a background in Earth Sciences with an MSc, a green MSc in geology from Dublin University Trinity College and a PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University. And Cobalt is currently using ore deposit science, data science and scientific computing to discover deposits of metals such as Cobalt which are key components for electric building batteries and he's also an adjunct professor at Dublin University where he's taught economic geology. So with that any further today I will hand over to Karen. Thank you very much. So I have the I'm very pleased to be here. I would rather be in Vienna but but this is the second best and and I'm also pleased to be able to to sort of open up this discussion which means that I will actually not talk much about mining. I'm sort of more going to really set the stage and maybe talk about why we talk about mining because there's a little bit the perception in some sort of part of society that mining is actually not something we need. It's kind of yesteryear we should become much more modern, we should go all circular and we should close all of the loops and then we wouldn't have to mine and then that's environmentally much much better. And so to just sort of get that portion of the discussion sort of started off a little bit I have sort of four words on my to-do list that I need to mention on behalf of the panel here. They are sustainability, circular economy, Europe and then of course tier science and and I don't have much time so I sort of am assisted here behind me. I put up as a background I put up this figure from the IT1 materials that represents the mineral value chain or also actually the circular economy because that's sort of a useful assist in talking about these things of sustainability and also about the circular economy obviously. So we start of course with the value chain up here where we have exploration and mining and then we go through some processing steps and then over here we have the things that we want the things that we're using the raw materials for houses or cars or computers whatever it is and then we are down here the user and then once we're done using it if we really really good about it then we recycle it and come sort of bring it back into the into the loop the material loop. And so basically sustainability for me there's sort of three components to that when you talk about raw materials because it's not like living resources or water resources once we take them out of the ground they are gone they're not going to grow back. So what does it actually mean to be sustainable? Well one it means getting them out of the ground in a responsible way in an environmental and socially responsible way. It also means actually that once they're into this loop to keep them in there for as long as possible at the highest possible value. So getting better at recycling and keeping raw materials and increasing our secondary sort of sources of raw materials is also part of the sustainability for me and then thirdly very importantly the consumption. We also have to think about do we just have to use more and more and more and when could we perhaps just do with less and have that be part of this sustainability. And all of those things are actually basically I think I'm going to walk over on the other side of the figure now I'm sort of entering into also what we think about as circular economies or you could see you enter into the value chain into the circular economy you keep it in the loop for as long as possible you minimize waste as you go along. But when we talk about circular economy it's very common that we bring in this term of closing the loops and again for many people that is actually like a real option. Why don't we just not mine and we just keep using again and again and then we'll be we'll be fine. There's several reasons for that and unfortunately I don't actually really have time to go into all of them but there are some that are related to the demand obviously and the demand is related to the number of people how much we use per person and these things are increasing in the world today but also very important it's also depending on the stock what's actually in here because we're using different war materials today than we were just a couple of decades ago some are the same but some are new ones especially in some of the new technologies so they're not there for us to recycle and also once we have them in the stock we want to keep them there for as long as possible which actually means as long as I'm driving my car or maybe even driving my shared car it's actually not going to be available to recycle so if we want things to last for a long time it's also going to be a long time until we can use them so for that reason we have to be sustainable in thinking about all of these solutions and I think today's topic is very much about this part of the value chain how do we find the raw materials and how do we get them out in good ways and how do we talk about that and how can two scientists and Europe actually contribute to that and so I have to have a little bit of a Europe hat on up in S2 and I think when you look at Europe one of the issues in Europe is that we are actually the region in the world uses the most of these materials the biggest consumer but we are probably the smallest contributor to actually what comes out so we use about 25 to 30 percent of the global production and we produce maybe 3 to 5 percent ourselves so this puts us of course in a in a societal challenging situation but it also sort of begs the moral question why are we doing that why are we not actually mining in our backyard where we have control over the environmental and the social impacts do we think in Europe perhaps that it is environmentally and socially more sustainable because it's taking place in other parts of the world South America Africa Asia or do we just prefer not to think about it and I think perhaps I'm leaning a little bit towards the last one and so then my final comment I hope I'm doing okay on time here is going to be about geosciences so how can we contribute well we can certainly contribute to everything that goes up on here goes on up here because this is really our expertise where are the raw materials how do we find them how do we find good processes for finding them and extracting them and if you saw the whole options that you had several of those very important issues they were all important issues ones that we can contribute with knowledge to but we can also contribute with actually understanding that's its higher value chain and making sure that we're part of the conversation about circular economy I'd like to always say that circular economy is too important to be left with the economist because they actually think about the loop and not so much about how do we get things into the economy how do we get things into the loop and finally I think when we talk about secondary secondary resources so the ones that we want to recycle that is a resource that's a real resource that we have in stock and we're actually not very good at that we're not very good at at extracting from it but it's partly because we don't understand the resource very well it's poorly mapped it's poorly understood and that geologists know we know how to make a resource estimate we know how to talk about complexity of all about grade about tonnage and so we can actually contribute hugely to start exploiting these secondary resources for society so with that I think I'm going to stop great thank you so much great start Karn so next up with Salim I think he wanted to share some slides okay greetings everyone I hope you can hear me loud and clear so just some quick coordinates there to introduce myself if you want to follow the conversation on social media Twitter handle there my goal is really to give you the interdisciplinary connection in this context one of the reasons why I feel there are so many conflicts around the extractive industries is that we operate in silos within this domain and this diagram is an attempt to try and get us thinking more integratively so that hopefully we can have consensus at the end of this debate rather than being further polarized so this diagram comes from an anthology which we put together a couple of years ago where we had scholars from all over the world who were interested in Africa that has become a particularly important continent for the extractive industries historically has unfortunately suffered a lot at the expense of a very irresponsible extraction as we well know from what happened in the DRC and sadly a lot of times Europeans were involved in that in the context of the EGU I should note but of late there is I think some glimmer of hope that the extractive industries in Africa can actually deliver on some of the development aspirations of the continent so in this book in the introduction I tried to synthesize some of the arguments in this diagram and the geoscientist will be happy to see that geoscience data is very much at the heart of the diagram and what we're looking at here is this science policy interface which is where data is really pivotal in terms of informing both policy makers and scientists and we need some interpretive filters to allow for this of course to be more functionally important I've also tried to highlight some key areas where we can be more specific in terms of how we approach these issues so if you if you consider on the the bottom half of the diagram where we're focusing more on the science part of the interface the the notion of industrial ecology is heavily important industrial ecology for those of you who are not familiar is a field that developed over the last 30 or so years where there was a realization that industry is now a permanent part of the ecosystem so to speak and that we are living in the Anthropocene we hope that this Anthropocene can be an ecozoic meaning that it it doesn't have to be a negative that we are as humans creating a geological kind of nomenclature for our existence but at the same time we could make it one where people are saying it can be an ecologically friendly ecozoic sub category in there as well so how do we do that well industrial ecology is one mechanism whereby we might do that where we start thinking about industrial systems just as we think about natural systems and that's where Karen's insights are very valuable because circularity is an important part of natural systems so if we start thinking of extractive industries in the same way I think we can actually come to some consensus now one point which is often misinterpreted by the public is this concept of renewability when we talk about minerals now of course a mine on geological timescales if you're extracting it's not renewable like a crop but if you think elementally and trained as a chemist I love the periodic table and I love to think elementally elements are of course infinitely renewable unless you have a nuclear reaction and you convert one element into another the problem is that we are moving those elements into higher states of entropy in terms of how we use them and then we have to invest energy to take them out of that state so as long as we have a mechanism whereby we can retrieve those elements you have actually a much more robust case for sustainability in that regard so this kind of an approach will help us go through the extractive industries in a more appropriate way now on the top side we have the policy interface and that's where we also need to invest our energies to have appropriate accountability mechanisms we need to make sure that the reporting is trustworthy so that those sustainability metrics are calibrated accurately and we also need a conflict resolution mechanism because communities oftentimes will feel agreed we will have to deal with power structures and the like so having those structures in place considering also the role of artisanal and small-scale mining very much close to that geoscience data interface where often that data is not available and so you have a highly itinerant and inefficient process you can actually improve the development outcomes of mining so we hope that this diagram can be helpful as a planning tool in this regard and finally I'll just share with you the second diagram that is based on some work we have done at the international resource panel and we just published a report which came out about two months ago and you can download the full 300 page report at resourcepanel.org but we looked at these issues from a governance perspective now this is where I think we can have some more provocative discussions also because this year is very important we have in 2020 the international seabed authority considering a new frontier for mineral extraction which would be the oceans and this is an area where we will hear later in the debate also about there are a lot of contentions now I would say if we applied the same industrial ecology approach to looking at mineral governance in these same kinds of categories we could approach methods like lifecycle analysis which comes from industrial ecology and you could compare what is the impact of terrestrial mining versus oceanic mining and you may be surprised that in some cases oceanic mining ends up having a lower impact in terms of carbon footprint or from the point of view of social impact it may have a lower impact as well whereas on the other hand with regard to biodiversity concerns it may potentially have a higher impact so having such a structured approach will hopefully help us to reach consensus and not get further polarized as we debate minerals and sustainability but I'll leave it there thank you. Thanks very much Zalim okay Andy if you want to just stop sharing your screen now yep Andy wonderful okay thanks very much Eva and thanks for the opportunity to speak and it's a shame also I'm sorry not to be in Vienna but I'm very grateful for everyone who's here and listening I'm something of an outsider I think in this group as my background as you mentioned is more in activism with mind-affected communities but I kind of hope that's going to help evoke debate many of the points I'd like to raise have also been elaborated in the reports that London Mining Network wrote with war on want called a justice transition so hopefully I'll put the link at the end of the chat window for those that want to follow it and having seen those graphics I wish I'd used a graphic now but I'm going to try like Karen to stress four initial points really and I'd really like to come back to the point on see mining that was raised earlier but I think we can do that in debate so my first point really is to stress that the crisis that we're at the moment we are indeed isn't just a climate crisis the climate is actually it's given that and climate crisis also isn't just about carbon so I'm glad that they abstract and the introduction kind of set us in the context of sustainable development in general however in practice when we tend to talk about the issue of increased need for metals it tends to be within the context of a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sustainable development or stress we have interlinked crises both socially and environmental and I think we need to actually address all of these I think the idea of kind of digging and processing more finite resources to solve one crisis isn't going to solve all of those intersecting crises but then my second point is going back to circular economy which has been mentioned twice already which is great just to stress that it is possible I think I mean it's going to be difficult and I think it will need a radical shift in thinking to get us there but I think it is possible and I think it also is the solution to these different crises I mentioned earlier so we are looking at a number of different ways that we can deal with this circular economy also looking at the growth which is not as a crazy idea as it's been sort of in the past and I think at least now we're getting more of a mainstream idea of criticising sort of slavishly following growing GDP is the only way forward I think it's going to require radical changes particularly innovation in product design I think one of the real problems is that going back to what we said earlier all of these metals are kind of together in products which haven't been created so they can be easily disassembled or let alone repaired and reused we also need to do more on urban mining you know to look at the amount of metals that are already in the system and that's definitely an area that needs further consideration I think the the challenge really is we need to move particularly fast if we're going to stave off these crises I think that actually requires shifts both personal shifts also governmental and business shifts in their prioritisation I think the third thing I want to make is to question the scale of new minerals that may be required for the energy transmission their transformation rather having talked about scale and speed of change required driven by these different crises I think I'd like to question some of the assertions of the estimates for increased need if you ever look at the various reports some of them are really as egotically insane there will be this level of increasing global or lithium etc I think in truth they're all s's really that kind of based on key assumptions and some of those assumptions are affected by our actions and choices such as for instance one of the estimates is that there will be one billion electric vehicles by 2050 I mean that's based on the idea that we'll keep making more and more vehicles and that maybe there'll be a swap from one internal combustion engine to one electric vehicle in that case then you would be looking at huge amounts of extra metals required actually you know we need to be thinking on a systemic level about how we travel how we live you know how we use public transport etc but we're not just talking about that straight swap and also I think the other area that's often not fact enough partly because it's difficult is disruptive innovation it's that idea that we're constantly finding new technologies substitution for minerals in technologies particularly around battery mineral and you know the idea of green hydrogen which although the fuel cells need metals as well you know much less than standard batteries and then the fourth point I'd like to make and the final point is that if there is any increased extraction then it's likely to come with increased conflict for impacted communities I think there's been a growing trend with increase in the number of resource conflicts there's a group called e-junk which has mapped them and I think has a round 3000 conflicts that mapped at the moment and of those around 600 are to do with metals and minerals etc so you know there's a sizable number of conflicts and they are growing I think the company in that is also a movement particularly amongst indigenous and land-based communities of the right to say no to extract projects that are happening on their land I think although this is happening mainly in the global south mentioned going back to that idea of Europe or whether we're mining Europe there is also notable that you know there are communities in Europe that are part of this right to say no movement and some examples include groups in Rosia who are posing Rosia Montana gold mining Romania groups in Portugal who are posing potential lithium mining and also not forgetting we have our indigenous peoples in Europe as well the Sami who are posing various projects in the Nordic countries I think those are my opening points and I look forward to coming back to those later in the debate thank you great thanks a million so finally we have Pat remand hi hello everyone I'm going to start by talking about you give some perspective from the mining and exploration industry the current oversupply in global markets for many raw materials basically masks a persistent underlying global challenge how to supply raw materials to an expanding global population set to reach 8.5 billion people by 2030 and that's the target date for the united nations sustainable development goals which as we know set of 17 common goals to achieve a sustainable future for our planet and its citizens and also by 2030 Europe has set a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent relative to 1990 levels so in order to achieve these goals as we all as we all know we need to accelerate the development and introduction of clean energy and clean energy storage technologies we also need to significantly decrease our non-energy emissions such as by increasing the use of electric vehicles and by developing more efficient and environmentally friendly building materials and all of this is happening at a time of increasing overall technology use across the board more phones more tablets TVs electronics in general all of these existing and emerging technologies have one thing in common they utilize a wide range of minerals and metals in large quantities I think this is a fact while I agree with Andy the amount we will ultimately use is certainly dictated by our choices we make I think it's inescapable that we need a lot and quite a variety of minerals so where will these minerals come from Karen has talked about the circular economy and of course metal recycling and reuse is important and new technological breakthroughs will also contribute to maintaining supply however given the sheer volume and variety of raw materials required it's clear that mining of primary materials will continue for the foreseeable future in order to meet the increasing global demand for metals and minerals the question for us as society is how we want this mining to be carried out which metals and minerals should be prioritized we mine lots of different commodities for different things and some are more important than others in my view and where in the world do we want our raw materials to come from this has been touched on by the other panelists in terms of mining in Europe versus elsewhere and today what I want to talk about are important ways in which I think our scientists can contribute to maintaining this global mineral supply which will underpin sustainable development in the coming decades firstly before you can mine anything it has to be discovered through mineral exploration which is the business that I'm in individual mines have finite lives as ore bodies are depleted and mining can only continue if new ore bodies are found however despite record amounts of spending on exploration over the past 20 years discovery rates are declining and as a result the unit cost per discovery has more than doubled in the past decade which makes the exploration business increasingly unattractive for investors so why are discovery rates declining there are multiple non-technical reasons for this including reduced access to land increased regulation higher overall exploration costs but on the technical side the world's outcropping or near-surface ore bodies have to a large extent already been discovered we're still mining resources that were found by the Romans pushing exploration and this pushes exploration into deeper search spaces where traditional exploration tools are less effective so how can we as our scientists reverse this declining discovery trend well to start with we need to develop better conceptual and predictive ore deposit models we need better deep-seeing geochemical and geophysical exploration tools for detection and we need to do a better job of collecting and using geoscience data and this includes more advanced data science and machine learning something that the company I worked for cobalt metals is pioneering secondly mining from a technical perspective has become more challenging why we're increasingly mining lower grade and marginally economic ore deposits often with very high capital costs and tight operating margins and we also rightly expect there to be more stringent regulations on waste rock storage and water usage so what can our scientists do to improve mining overall we need to do a better job at ore body characterization we need to build better 3d ore body and waste rock models in order to optimize mining and extraction and to minimize the environmental impact of individual mines we're also living the time of rapid technological change and I think it's actually a very exciting time to be a geoscientist our toolbox is getting bigger all the time we have portable instruments like portable xrf's hyperspectral scanners access to low-cost multi-element geochemical analysis new geophysical tools and information technology and all of these technologies generate orders of magnitude more geoscience data than we've had to deal with in the past the challenge for us as geoscientists is to combine all these new data streams with what I call foundational geoscience knowledge and skills which include things like geological mapping patrography mineralogy and an in-depth understanding of of ore genesis um finally um our scientists our scientists in general and particularly those of us who work in in mineral exploration mining I think really need to do a better job of communicating what we do communicating our vision of how best to continue to supply the world with the raw materials that we need and to do so in a sustainable way so with that I will hand back to you Nifa thanks for my impact that's great thank you and you touched on some interesting points all four of you uh on the last point I think we'll come back to maybe near the end of the debate about the idea of communications and improved communications and how we can move forward with that I think that's key but just to go back maybe on some of the um oh sorry before I continue I should say to anybody tuned in please do submit your questions keep them coming in the questions and answers they are being looked at as we go along so you don't need to put in your questions more than once we will we can flick back through them and see them somebody else also asked how many people we have in the room so to speak at the moment we have about 240 so fluctuating so just to give an idea of how many we have on board here today and so I'll just move back to maybe looking at the kind of the global versus you know kind of supply global supply chain so to speak and and I think in light of the current pandemic and the current COVID crisis um I think it's highlighted for many people just how vulnerable we are in terms of a global supply chain and minerals is one of those things that truly is global in terms of of where they're coming from and going to and currently you refer to consumption in Europe versus our production and so on so in terms of specifically the minerals on the mineral side what do we need to improve in the kind of immediate and short term are we looking at for example mining in our own backyard in Europe um or how quickly will that happen versus decreasing our our consumption or are we looking at going into new territories completely in and new areas where you don't have those that conflict and you mentioned almost 3000 kind of mapped conflict areas when it comes to mining projects so what should we be looking to to try and solve that when we're looking at supply chains into Europe so that's not for anybody in particular Selene do you want to take that I chime in in terms of this notion of you know security of mineral resources that is often brought up my approach to this if you use the industrial ecology kind of paradigm you should be mining in places where it is ecologically most efficient you should be mining those areas and ores where you can do it with the least energy investment with the least environmental impact my concern is if we go down this route of well Europe should have its own little kitty and America should have its own kitty because we're afraid of China or we're afraid of some other country you will end up with sometimes ecologically inefficient outcomes and then you will have even more conflicts so I think we need to have a very deliberate data driven ecologically driven approach to where we prioritize mining that doesn't mean we we do not engage in exploration as Pat has rightly said there is a paucity of exploration there's a huge time lag between exploration and development but the ultimate metrics of where mining is prioritized should be ecological metrics of efficiency so we mitigate conflict and we also mitigate impact on the environment anybody else want to take that yeah I can I could either yeah I I wouldn't disagree with that I guess for me one of the key concerns really is particularly around standards you know environmental human rights worker standards etc and I think yeah what we want to be doing is creating as much as possible level playing field and a way towards on on what the team was saying I think yeah in doing that one of the key things we have to do is to have better due diligence done the the OECD the organization of economic creation and development has some really really good guidelines on due diligence particularly with regard to human rights abuses happening etc I mean their voluntary I think we need to ensure that there is more mandatory human rights due diligence and indeed that happens in some European countries and I think the European Commission of Justice has just said they're going to look at it for all companies not just mining all companies I think that's that's a fairly essential thing to do both in terms of the environment and in terms of human rights and workers rights yeah Karen yes I'd like to comment as well I agree I think that is it is extremely important that we find out how we can create just a level playing field and also how we can enable everyone and actually making good decisions about this and again so referring to my oh it's it's mirrored here referring to my my little loop of the material flow up here when you look at this group out here the manufacturers I think they're going to be incredibly important politicians decision makers policy makers and these guys they're going to be very instrumental in us being able to move forward because if they start taking responsibility for the sourcing of the raw materials that go into their products if they start caring about that and if they also start caring about whether they can be recycled and how they can be recycled then we are actually creating all of a sudden a different playing field than we have now because right now there is that little bit sort of freefall and it's very investor dependent and all of these different parts of the value chain have different business models different investor groups and one of the big problems in the upstream portion is for instance that we have for years we've known that there are critical raw materials critical for Euro critical for US whatever region you're in or whatever industry you're in and we've actually not really succeeded in changing the the value chains for those or the supply chains for those even though we've concentrated on it for a long time because the investors they still just want to invest in finding golden diamonds and so until we actually get some regulation and some sort of centralized decision-making forcing these guys to be responsible then I think it's going to be a little bit of yep. I agree with Salim there are certainly better places to mine than others and those decisions can be made on an individual project basis. I mean our deposits are distributed around the world based on natural processes we don't we don't we don't choose where where those deposits occur. I think Andy's point about a level playing field is an important one and it's certainly not a level playing field now globally in terms of regulation around mining and waste handling and communities etc and I think what everyone can do that's listening to this debate and society in general is to understand better where these materials come from and my view is that there's there's general lack of knowledge on that you know most people have a phone have a mobile phone an iPhone there's a battery unit which is cobalt and lithium where does that come from and do people know and and I believe people should know and they should they should care and they should put pressure on the companies that manufacture these devices and technologies and on governments who regulate the mining companies who who mine the raw materials that go into the products but it starts I think with being better informed. Yeah and actually that touches on a question I had and also that some that are coming in on on the questions and answers section there so for example from Kenneth asking about you know corporate social responsibility and in terms of and harmonizing policies but also in terms of looking at kind of you know because this is global and that's partly what makes it so difficult and should we have some kind of you know a system of checks and balances for the mining sector so that there is a broad harmonization of how these things are mined if not where if we can't dictate where they are so for example something like a you know a kimberley process style framework where minerals are expected to be produced or to be to be exploited to certain standards do we think that we'll ever get towards that kind of is it is that too complicated. Maybe I can chime in since we just did this report on mineral resource governance for the UN international resource panel I think currently the standards which are there that Andy noted we should have a level playing field I totally agree I think it doesn't preclude the fact that we should be mining in ecologically efficient areas because if you have standards then you can do that better we have them like the IFC performance standard the international finance corporation you have the OECD guideline they are useful but to be honest they're quite wishy washy you know they're very macro level they're all you know a grand strategy kind of level guidelines you have to bring them a little bit more down to earth often that requires national regulations one of the things we have been suggesting especially with regard to mineral supply and demand many times you get these kinds of rash decisions on mining because there is a kind of panic around supply and making sure that we are able to meet the demands of certain industries so if we have a much more global process for planning that then we could be more effective so there have been some suggestions including coming from Europe and coming from many European countries that we should have some kind of a global treaty mechanism for mineral supply and demand which includes environmental and social standards and so on as well so currently there is a process of review and consultation that's going on around mineral governance since our report came out and at the next United Nations Environment Assembly which will be held hopefully in March of 2021 there is a proposal to have a discussion around whether there should be some international mechanism which is part it could be it doesn't have to be a separate treaty it could be an inter-treaty protocol which looks at all the various environmental treaties so it considers the biodiversity impacts it considers the climate change aspects and so on and then it also looks at the the needs that countries have for mineral supply so they feel more secure that people are not going to blackmail them with regard to pricing and so on and there could be an integrative protocol that could be negotiated by UN member states but that should be on the card so we can deal with both of these challenges. Andy what do you want to respond to that? Yeah I think that's fair and I think going back to your original point I think you know CSR that corporate social responsibility is good and I think in my sort of 20 odd years more actually have been involved in this you know I've seen improvements pretended to see very often is improvements in these glossy reports and sometimes less so on the ground and I think some of that is because most of the CSR tends to be voluntary though I think you know basically just guidelines just general standards etc and often so whatever we have ideally should be mandatory and that's likely to be implemented by national legislation but I guess the last point is just to say you know whatever is going to happen probably has to be credible at ground level as well obviously the greatest problem we've had in working with communities over these years is implementation by companies at ground level partly because it's quite difficult to do particularly in conflict regions or in regions where there's already ongoing human rights abuses then clearly it's very difficult for companies even with good will to be able to work with the local communities. Yeah these issues can become very complex very quickly and I have a question here from that I'll take from John Lutton who is asking are we chasing lithium and cobalt as a quick stop solution while most probably there will be developments in battery technology and then more common resources such as sodium or hydrogen as a fuel. Karen do you want to take that? I can certainly start on a show Patrick I can see he's itching to let me just quickly say that I think you know you can always ask that question and I actually do think as I also alluded to before I think that sometimes we are chasing the wrong things because it's so investor driven so it's really about how good are you at convincing someone who has a lot of money that this is a great project and it's all about you know stock dynamics and all kinds of other things that I'm not that smart about but there's a lot of that that is driving unfortunately the exploration industry and I think that is something that certainly could be improved upon and I do think that we do need to look at it globally and at a societal level in terms of the the social license to operate and in terms of the regulation and the level playing field because it's great that a company could go in somewhere and and open a school and support a local football team but we really need to take a joint responsibility for this and also take joint responsibility for what it is we think we need and that is changing at all times so so yes we might be looking for stuff now that's going to be obsolete in in the decade but but right now we actually are in a position where we where we need it so so we have to be flexible and and and able to adjust Pat did you want to jump in there um yeah in terms of the specific question cobalt and lithium and their usage in batteries um the the physiochemistry of cobalt in particular means that it makes really good batteries um that that in terms of how they charge and discharge and how they maintain their structure and how they don't overheat and catch fire and and there are lots of different battery technologies being developed but as it stands right now high cobalt batteries have some of the best properties and and lots of companies are investing in very large battery manufacturing plants focused on on on batteries that use cobalt um so for now unless something changes and and it's hard to see that changing in the short term the world will need a a sustainable supply of cobalt to make those batteries and in fact that that's precisely the reason that the company and I worked for came into existence was to go forth and find more more cobalt particularly to find cobalt resources outside of outside of the drc right now 70 of the world's cobalt comes from the drc and already on the order of 20 of that is is is carried out by artisanal miners including child labor and some really bad environmental practices so having a more diversified supply from from other countries uh other other places for cobalt uh makes makes a lot of sense and that's uh that's actually what our company are doing are doing right now maybe one point I would make on batteries is that um depending on the use there there is a lot of potential I'm seeing with the vanadium redox batteries particularly in areas where for example on islands where you may want to have a power grid that requires uh no intermittent storage the good thing with vanadium redox for that it's not going to replace cobalt in other uses but you know cobalt is more versatile but vanadium has the potential also for greater circularity dealing with what Karen has been talking about so the Australians have invested in fact a lot of money into a new cooperative reset center on batteries and they have in fact chosen vanadium redox batteries one of their areas of interest so yes I mean the sodium ones and all are less likely currently for other reasons for safety reasons and so on um but you know there there's constant research john good enough who won the Nobel Prize last year at 90 plus for the lithium ion battery he's still in his lab working on new batteries and you know he's looking at iron fluorides and other things and so that's great you know that's the beauty of science but I would say cobalt's here to stay for the time being as well as lithium but vanadium deserves a lot of attention okay thanks I have two very short questions and then I'm going to come back to you for a kind of a more general final question if that's okay Andy I have one for you uh there's a question about who owns the seafloor outside of marine boundaries and do we know how much it might be affected by any kind of extraction just an ownership question short you're not very short is it because well I quickly say on the batteries just to say I think it's very strange that we're in a position where we are now minds take quite a while to come in innovation is happening so quick that I think it's sometimes always difficult for economic decisions on mining to catch up I really agree with what Karen said that it's a shame that so much of it seems to be invested in for the moment in terms of the outside of exclusive economic zones it's the high seas and that's the international seabed authority we don't mentioned earlier which is looking at pipelines at the moment okay thank you and Karen I've one from uh James who is asking about the proportion of materials or minerals do we know how much is recycled or realistically how much we might get to in terms of recycle and recycle efficiency versus you know extractive version raw material we do we sort of do I mean there's a there's a group of our Yale University actually the industrial ecology group at Yale University who actually works quite specifically on trying to assess how much are we recycling and how much can we recycle with our current technologies and also perhaps and this is enabling us to actually talk about this this thing that I mentioned before that if it takes so much energy to to get a metal out of some mixed alloy compared to getting out of a rock then what might the right decision be and so that data is really really important in trying to make those decisions and so basically we are when you look at something like the rare earth elements of which we don't have many in stock because we haven't used them sort of substantially over the last many decades if you look at those we're really bad at recycling them it's it's less than five percent but pretty much all of them currently but if you look at some of uh sort of the base metal you look at copper you look at steel recycling aluminum recycling there we actually really quite good so it oftentimes has to do there we above I think about 70 percent for all of them so it very much has to do also with how complex are your alloys because unmixing alloys is something that again someone who doesn't really necessarily know this field think that we should just go ahead and recycle this but it's actually really difficult to do and sometimes very energy intensive to to do that as well okay great thank you then I have one last question came in from a few people and from my own side as well and and from I think Jess Franklin was the last one that I saw on the chat there so how do we how do we now move forward and create a more informed debate we're talking about new territories we're talking about you know developing potentially more mineral resources in Europe increased number of of conflicts and making sure that communities are not you know exploited in in this context so how do we create a more informed debate and how do we better engage with people so that for example that they can understand where the resources in their foam come from or for example how that might impact C4 if we're moving into those kind of territories or just the you know being able to ask those questions so I'll take the same order if you want and if you want to add any kind of last-minute wrap-up as well because we're rapidly running out of time here and while you're speaking Chloe what we might do is put the poll back up so and Karen if you want to take that just in terms of the kind of communication side and any final comments absolutely yes I think it's actually a really really important question and what I think happens a lot is that we gather in fora like this one today it's it's great there's more than 200 people on board and and it's also a good panel but we many times tend to preach a little bit to the choir and talk to each other about how smart we are and how right we are and all the things that society really ought to be doing so I think a really important part is to really get outside of this room and into some rooms for some people who don't have our background our knowledge and so I'm very pleased to meet me this way again I'd rather have met in in Vienna and have two hours for this debate in rather than one hour but I think it's really important to engage in the conversation with people who will be making decisions about these things and that actually starts with also talking to the very little ones I know half of you are probably homeschooling at the moment but let's make sure that the decision makers and the geoscientists of the future also actually knows what's in their home I would just I would echo that and add to that you know there needs to be some kind of mechanism in terms of consumers knowing what is in the product and you know we've often put labels on cereal boxes of what minerals are in the cereals and sadly we know more about that than we do about what minerals are in our daily products so I mean one of the things I've been advocating for is some better elemental accounting so the public actually knows what is in their product and that will help them and you know that raises awareness but also because the metals and other kinds of constituents which go into products are often so distant in the supply chain they're very deep in the supply chain we do need better communication platforms one of the things which we are hoping to develop myself and a few other colleagues is an online platform which we hope will be ready later this year so stay tuned for that called mineral choices which will be trying to synthesize scientific research easily digestible for a general audience around mineral supply chains so that will hopefully be also something useful we're working with the natural history museum in London and others so stay tuned lots of good stuff happening in that space right Andy wonderful thanks well we've run out of time so I'm very short answer which is to say I mean in terms of communication I agree with what's been said before particularly with what Lauren said but I would really encourage geoscientists you know to get out and talk to people like us activists I mean we're really keen for that definitely I mean and also particularly communities I know that Geoscientist Australia has a kind of best practice of working with free prime form consent with local indigenous people obviously less likely to happen here in Europe but still we would welcome working with Geoscientist particularly because it's very difficult for communities to get people to critique for instance environmental impact test so if people have skills they may well be interesting coming on board with what we're doing okay thanks a lot great thanks Andy Chloe sorry I think you can take down the poll there Patrick if you want to go ahead yeah um yeah I agree with what what what the other speakers have said um I think it it talking talking to each other as geoscientists is clearly is clearly not enough and I think more more communication and more education in our school systems around this topic where where the stuff you use comes from how it gets recycled is is a really important part of this and I think you know the technologies that we're talking about that require these metals actually will facilitate this communication even even more so so I think we all need to just just make use of these various platforms communication platforms to get that message out there both to to society in general and and to political leaders let them make them understand these various issues yep I think it's the message is be a bit braver about who we're talking to maybe and step outside our own comfort zone and so unfortunately we've run out of time Chloe out of interest maybe you could just give us the results of the polls there while I'm finishing up so okay okay so both yeah okay so environment and the ecosystem impact seems to be quite important for for most over half of the of the audience so some interesting results we'll have a look at those numbers the other thing just I'd like to finish Chloe if I can just share my screen there for a second okay so I just wanted to wrap up really by thanking all the speakers let me just slide no and by thanking all our speakers thank you everybody for joining in and for contributing uh we will have we have all the the comments that we're coming in on the chat and we have all the questions and answers what I might try and do is the questions that we couldn't get to we will maybe try and address offline as if we can add them at the end of the recording or find another way that we can put some of that information up for people and and try and answer as many of your questions as possible and but other than that just to say thank you to everybody sorry we ran over time I was so slightly thank you Chloe and the EGU guys for the technical support um and to our speakers particularly those who had to get out of the bed to join us so a bit thank you to everybody and best of luck with the EGU and stay safe thanks very much