The Rush for Critical Minerals Is Reshaping Communities. Gender Analysis Helps Show Who Pays the Cost.

May 21, 2026 | Maryruth Belsey Priebe

There are troubling trends at both ends of the minerals supply chain. On one end, communities across the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lithium Triangle, Indonesia, and Philippines are bearing the social and environmental brunt of a global mining rush for cobalt, lithium, copper, and rare earths. Impacts including forced displacement, water pollution, armed group proliferation, and increasing incidents of sexual- and gender-based violence (SGBV). On the other end, governments are pouring money into renewables projects and rearmament like never before. Worldwide military spending hit USD 2.7 trillion in 2024, a tenth consecutive year of growth. And while nations race to deploy clean energy, minerals demand could grow sixfold by 2040 if current trends persist. The communities in the middle of these pressures are some of the world’s most vulnerable.

Addressing these connections has largely been led by groups within the environmental peacebuilding field. International Alert, Saferworld, PACT, Global Witness among others have developed an extensive body of work on the ways in which mineral extraction fuels armed violence while simultaneously harming communities. Initiatives such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)'s Due Diligence Guidance for Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, and even the UN Secretary-General's Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals signal an awareness that preventing conflicts must be central to mineral sourcing.

What remains underdeveloped within this growing field is a systematic gender lens applied to the demand side of critical minerals, not only to the communities where extraction occurs. Who decides what certain minerals are strategically essential, and for what purposes? Who pays the social price for those decisions in their communities? How might Women, Peace and Security (WPS) frameworks offer insight into governing demand and supply chains if we thought about applying them upstream from the conflict/post-conflict situations where we have typically used WPS interventions?

This piece draws on the analytical framework developed by Professor Pascale Massot — key advisor to APF Canada's Canada-Indo-Pacific Critical Minerals Hub and author of the award-winning China's Vulnerability Paradox: How the World's Largest Consumer Transformed Global Commodity Markets (Oxford University Press, 2024). Massot's insistence on disaggregating the critical minerals category — distinguishing minerals by use, volume, and supply concentration — turns out to be a useful scaffold for gender analysis. It extends the conflict-sensitive approaches that environmental peacebuilders are increasingly advocating for. Running a feminist lens through that framework reveals where existing attention has concentrated, and where it has not yet reached.

What We're Actually Talking About

Let’s start with some definitions. “Critical minerals” isn’t a geological designation, it’s a political one. As Massot notes, most nations judge criticality based on two factors: what we use them for (defense, green technology, high-tech manufacturing) and how secure our supply is (specifically how concentrated sourcing is). Canada, the United States, the European Union, and NATO all publish lists, none of which perfectly overlap because their strategic imperatives differ.

Putting aside the politics of it all, there are two groups of critical minerals we care about for this purpose:

Critical minerals for the green transition — needed in large and growing volumes:

  • Copper: needed for electrical wiring, grid infrastructure, EV motors, and renewable energy systems; demand is projected to nearly double by 2035 as electrification accelerates.
  • Lithium: primary component in rechargeable batteries for EVs and energy storage; demand rose nearly 30% in 2024 alone.
  • Nickel and cobalt: key inputs for high-energy-density battery cathodes.
  • Graphite: used in battery anodes; China produces approximately 80% of global supply.

Rare earth elements (REEs) — a distinct subset, needed in smaller volumes but with extreme supply concentration and direct military applications:

The supply concentration is stark: China mines around 69% of the world's rare earths and processes approximately 90%, is the leading refiner of 19 out of 20 key strategic minerals with an average market share of 70%, while the DRC alone produced roughly 74% of global cobalt in 2024. Both the most militarily-critical and the most green-transition-critical minerals are overwhelmingly sourced from some of the world's most fragile and conflict-affected states — a fact that should put community-level impacts at the center of any serious governance conversation, and largely does not.

Who Decides What "Critical" Means?

Massot's observation that criticality is a political definition is a useful entry point. NATO's priority list has aluminum at the top. Other lists are prepared by ministries of defense, departments of energy, as well as industry groups, each bringing different notions of which security matters are critical.

Within a conflict-sensitive peacebuilding community, organizations such as International Alert, Saferworld, PACT and NRGI are attempting to increase awareness about mineral supply chains and give a greater voice to local community stakeholders in the debate for good governance. In its June 2024 launch, the UN Secretary-General's Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals called on parties to consider human rights, environmental standards and justice, in addition to securing supply chains. Groups like NRGI and Resource Justice Network are calling for gender-responsive minerals governance.

What has remained missing on the demand side is attention to gender, especially in areas where green and defense interests meet in fragile and conflict-affected communities. There's also a straightforward representational issue: According to 2023 UN Women data, only 23% of global environment ministers are women. The share is likely smaller in defense and industrial policy circles — where the key minerals decisions get made — and there's no requirement to conduct an assessment of gendered impacts of sourcing choices.

The Supply Side: Who Bears the Costs?

Extraction communities

Communities bordering mining operations often bear costs that disproportionately fall on women. The Women's Rights and Mining working group, for instance, reports that women suffer at greater rates than men in terms of environmental degradation that comes with mining operations, due in large part to their duties and responsibilities for household water and food security needs. Whether or not they're located near mines in the Lithium Triangle, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Indonesia, or the Philippines, women feel the effects of water pollution and agricultural lands destroyed by mines before others. As research on mining's gendered legacy in Indonesia has demonstrated, "the loss of land and resources to mining projects along with the pollution of the environment impact most heavily upon women in local communities who are seen as key subsistence providers." Men aren't immune to the negative effects of mining. Occupational death and injury rates within artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) are among the highest across any sector, while young men are disproportionately recruited — either willingly or through force — into militia economies that benefit from mining revenues.

SGBV is one of the most-researched areas about mining's social impact, and it's also one of the least discussed in any strategic context. The research from the DRC region is one of the clearer examples. Analyses in that country have determined that women who live near artisanal mining sites utilized by armed groups are statistically more likely to have experienced sexual violence than other women. Research from Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) researchers, like Kelly et al., illustrates that women aren't merely victims needing rescue within mining communities but are also important economic agents. Policies that remove women from mining occupations without alleviating economic conditions have potentially made matters worse in some instances. The issue is that the sheer volume of largely male workers entering the area, the camp economies formed, and the deterioration of social norms within the communities are predictable problems that are unmonitored and unsupported by current supply chain governance mechanisms.

Illegal mining only compounds this problem. For instance, illegal mining profits in the DRC, the Central African Republic, and in parts of the Sahel finance militia groups, expand the territorial scope of these groups, and cause cycles of violence that target women and men in different ways. The formalization of ASM or the process of integrating informal mining operations into formal, state-controlled regulatory frameworks, is seen as a way to cut mining off from the flow of finances to armed groups, yielding benefits for supply chain integrity by creating more secure, traceable sourcing.

Land rights are a persistent and structural weakness as well. In much of the resource-rich Global South, women still lack official, legal rights to landownership, meaning that when lands are vacated for mines, women aren't considered when compensation is handed out. Processes such as Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) — which, even when followed strictly, is only applied inconsistently, in practice, to the formal landowners and leaders within the community, a category in most regions that excludes women.

Refining and processing

The environmental toll associated with rare earth refining is also high, producing radioactive waste, toxic acids, and water pollution. It's reasons like these that Western countries have effectively offshored rare earth refining during the last three decades. Chinese producers, in particular, operate under less-restrictive environmental standards and with state subsidies, thereby undercutting their domestic competitors. Yet, the environmental harm does not disappear, it's merely relocated. Women in these surrounding communities shoulder a disproportionate share of the health impacts arising from toxic byproducts.

Occupational gender divisions continue within refining sectors as well. In formal jobs within the industry, men dominate, while women continue to work in informal and lower-paid, often more dangerous occupations like artisanal ore sorting, informal sales, and trade. They also work in the service economy around mining and extraction processes. For women in the cobalt belt of the DRC, work is also found in unpaid caregiving roles in addition to collecting ore under poor safety conditions. Refining companies will commonly make informal sector workers redundant once they close down operations. Women in these less regulated jobs often lose the economic means they had gained when formalization is introduced based on the industry's terms rather than those of the workers.

The Demand Side: Whose Priorities Drive the Rush?

Conflict-sensitive approaches to critical minerals have primarily focused on the supply side of the industry: on governance issues, ASM formalization, FPIC, community involvement in extraction areas and other concerns. These issues, while important, have received far less attention than the demand side of the industry and it's here where the gender lens has been least applied.

Defense-driven demand: a governance gap

As military expenditures rise worldwide, a phenomenon the UN Secretary-General estimates will reach USD 6.6 trillion by 2035, the need for rare earth elements found in weapons systems increases simultaneously. Fin actuators on precision-guided missiles, permanent magnets on radar equipment, and propulsion components in naval vessels and fighter aircraft all contain critical REEs. An estimated 78% of U.S. weapons programs contain parts that use rare earth magnets. These materials are sourced predominantly operating within institutions in which a gender-based analysis of sourcing decisions is not standard practice and community impacts aren't included as risks.

There are consequences to this oversight beyond human rights issues alone. The harmful community-level outcomes experienced by those sourcing resources — such as rising rates of SGBV in cobalt mining areas, displaced indigenous women in lithium mining regions, or severe health impacts occurring in refining areas — are seen as side effects rather than integral parts of the overall problem. However, communities characterized by tenuous land rights for women and high SGBV rates are also societies in which social structures are weakening, which creates a heightened risk of disruption within the supply chains. Companies are losing billions of dollars per year due to mining-related conflicts. For one corporation, losses over two years came to USD 6 billion due to conflict between the company and the community. In Chile, an estimated USD 25 billion in mining projects have been affected by such disputes. The arguments made on behalf of peacebuilding and supply chain resilience are thus inextricably linked.

There is also a harder question worth asking directly: if the minerals used to manufacture weapons are extracted in ways that generate displacement, fuel armed group activity, and destabilize communities — is the net security gain what it appears to be? When procurement decisions framed as serving national security inadvertently produce the conditions of instability they aim to avert, there's an inherent disconnect the field has largely declined to name. Revenues derived from illegal and informal ASM fund the actions of militias and extend the control that armed groups wield over regions in the DRC, the Central African Republic, and across various African Sahel countries. These are, incidentally, the same regions that supply many of the critical minerals needed for both defense applications and green transition initiatives. Sourcing these minerals without taking into account conflict-sensitive governance doesn't simply harm local communities, it provides funds that contribute to the instability that security efforts are intended to counter. The wellbeing of these communities should not be seen as a price to be paid for supply chain improvements. Such a choice comes with steep costs, both in terms of human suffering and the supply disruptions that community conflict naturally brings about.

This is where WPS frameworks — when employed as analytical tools rather than mere compliance requirements — offer a unique contribution. The WPS agenda extends beyond simply ensuring women's presence at peace negotiation tables. Instead, it functions as a framework for identifying points of weakness in human security that are likely to lead to unrest. The communities engaged in rare earth mining in fragile and conflict-affected states represent the exact environments in which this framework is most useful and yet it's conspicuously absent from discussions concerning how these materials are obtained.

Green transition demand

The green transition picture is different, though not without the same tensions. Copper, lithium, nickel, and cobalt are needed in larger volumes, their markets are more dispersed, and — as Massot observes — interests across major actors are less divergent than on the defense side, creating more space for cooperative governance. 

However, communities paying the price for green-transition minerals extraction often find themselves on the frontlines of climate change as well. Women are disproportionately displaced by climate events. Women also more commonly provide household food and water security. When mining exacerbates environmental degradation in communities already living on the edge due to climate changes, they'll be among the first to pay the price. Pushing extraction through these communities to supply green energy without redressing these underlying conditions is simply cost-shifting that our transition narrative obscures.

The decision-making table

G7 minerals coordination, bilateral partnership agreements, and national minerals strategies are where the rules get written. Gender advisors and WPS practitioners are almost entirely absent from these processes. The OECD notes that only 55% of climate-related Official Development Assistance (ODA) integrates gender equality objectives — and that's in development contexts where gender mainstreaming has been nominally required for decades. In minerals security frameworks, the figure would be lower still.

What Peacebuilders and Policymakers Should Do Differently

Track minerals investment as a conflict early warning indicator. The correlation between extraction activity, SGBV, land conflict, and community instability is documented in the research literature. Peacebuilding practitioners and conflict analysts should be incorporating critical minerals investment data into early warning frameworks — not waiting for open conflict before making the supply chain connection.

Apply WPS as an analytical tool for supply chain governance. Communities where women's land rights are insecure, SGBV is rising, or FPIC processes have been circumvented are communities where supply disruption risk is also elevated. Making that connection explicit — that WPS analysis is relevant to supply chain governance, not only post-conflict inclusion — is a reframing the field can make, and one with real traction for governments and companies trying to reduce sourcing risk. Some compliance mechanisms do show what is possible when accountability is built into international finance. The IFC's Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) — an independent accountability office for World Bank Group private sector lending — has developed grievance and due diligence protocols that represent a meaningful precedent for embedding community protection into financing conditions. Extending that model to other international standards operating in minerals-intensive contexts is a concrete step worth pushing for. Organizations like Accountability Counsel have worked to help affected communities navigate and access these mechanisms — though accountability bodies are not always free from questions of impartiality, and their design matters as much as their existence.

Prioritize ASM formalization that centers women. Formalization is one of the most effective tools for delinking artisanal mining from armed group financing and building traceable supply chains. But formalization processes that don't actively ensure women's participation and labor rights in practice reproduce existing inequities at scale. Gender-responsive formalization is both a peacebuilding imperative and a supply chain quality issue. Certification schemes offer useful reference points, even if imperfect ones. The Fairmined standard, developed by the Alliance for Responsible Mining, is among the most developed examples for artisanal gold — verifying environmental management, responsible practices, and some social conditions. The Responsible Jewellery Council provides a parallel example from the formal sector. Whether these models can be meaningfully extended to other critical minerals, and whether existing certifications do enough to embed a gender perspective in their requirements, are questions worth pressing — but they are at least examples of what sector-level accountability can look like when the political will is there.

Bring gender analysis into demand-side governance. Minerals strategies, partnership frameworks, and procurement decisions should include gender advisors — not to add a box-checking section, but because understanding who bears the costs of sourcing choices is essential to assessing those choices' long-term social sustainability. Conflict with communities is measurably expensive, the communities most at risk are predictable, and gender analysis helps identify them earlier.

Design circular economy and recycling systems with equity in mind. Possibly the best lever available for increasing supply chain resilience today is decreasing primary extraction pressure with recycling and urban mining. For a start, these industries are inherently more distributed, low-impact, and women-accessible forms of employment than big extractive projects or centralized refining facilities. But we won't see that potential unless we mandate policy including labor rights and women’s participation at the ground floor instead of trying to tack it on after the fact.

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The environmental peacebuilding community is engaging with critical minerals governance with growing seriousness — on conflict-sensitive approaches, ASM formalization, supply chain due diligence, and community rights. The gender-and-extractives field has mapped women's roles, risks, and exclusions in mining communities with increasing sophistication. What neither has done consistently is apply that combined lens to the demand side — the procurement decisions and strategic frameworks shaping which minerals get extracted, from where, and at whose expense. With global military spending surging and the green transition accelerating simultaneously, both drivers pulling from the same fragile communities, that gap is becoming harder to justify.