CAN Position on Transition Minerals
November 2025
Summary of key points
● Sufficiency first. Curb excessive and wasteful energy consumption in high-income countries that inflates demand for transition minerals; prioritise those minerals for an energy transition that tackles energy poverty first and foremost and provides renewables for all – centering equity, efficiency, and sufficiency; mandate circularity by designing for long lifespans and high-value retention; require modularity, standardisation, and easy disassembly; ensure open access to information to enable repair, reuse, and repurposing; and promote appropriate recycling.
● Democratic scrutiny and meaningful engagement. Guarantee binding, inclusive, rights-based participation at all levels; ensure that defenders who raise concerns about mining activities are neither attacked nor threatened; recognise, empower, and protect Indigenous Peoples, affected communities, workers (formal and informal) and their unions, women and gender-diverse people, and artisanal and small-scale miners (ASM), with clear pathways to formalisation, freedom of association and collective bargaining, social protection, and safe working conditions; uphold multiple knowledge systems on equal terms; guarantee respect for the rights of Indigenous Peoples to self-determination, including the right to define their own development priorities and to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC); enact gender-responsive human rights and environmental due diligence legislation with civil and administrative liability across the entire value chain, from cradle to grave.
● Highest safeguards. Improve and translate voluntary standards relevant to mining and supply chains (e.g., UNGPs, OECD, EITI, IRMA, and IFC) into binding laws, enforced by regulators, meaningful sanctions, and effective access to remedy; embed the rights to health, clean air, water, and a healthy environment in all legal frameworks; require health-centred Environmental and Social Impact Assessments (ESIAs) and Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) across all project stages; uphold international environmental law; uphold ecological red lines (e.g., restricted areas, 1.5 °C alignment, and biophysical limits).
● Fiscal justice and benefit-sharing. Build sovereign capacity, ensure fair value capture and effective community benefit-sharing; establish a fairer and strengthened tax regime underpinned by full transparency of contracts and disclosures of revenues; this to include robust frameworks on local content to ensure fair and equitable economic benefit to communities hosting transition mineral resources.
● Fair trade and policy space. Uphold the right to development and preserve policy space for domestic value-addition by ending Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) and similar investor privileges and by renegotiating neo-colonial trade deals; ensure technology transfer and sharing, including waivers on essential technologies.
● UN oversight and leadership. Establish an inclusive UN monitoring, investigation, and complaints mechanism with guaranteed access for trade unions, affected communities, and Indigenous Peoples; recognise the UN Secretary-General’s report on critical energy transition minerals; support the development of the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation; support a Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt; mobilise additional international finance beyond ODA for just transitions away from extractivism; support a UN Treaty on Transnational Business Enterprises and Human Rights; negotiate a global agreement on equitable material-demand reduction aligned with the UNFCCC principles, including CBDR-RC, international human rights standards, and the Sustainable Development Goals; integrate a transition minerals track into the UNFCCC Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP).
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Download file: http://CAN-Position-on-Transition-Minerals-final.pdf