There’s a bitter irony at the heart of the green energy revolution: the minerals needed to power it are often buried beneath the homelands of the very communities least responsible for the climate crisis.
Indigenous leaders from across four continents gathered last week to deliver a blunt warning to governments and energy companies alike. The transition away from fossil fuels, they say, is fast becoming a new chapter in a very old story of dispossession.
“They called it progress before, when they took our land for oil pipelines,” said one representative from the Amazon basin, speaking at a coalition press briefing in Geneva. “Now they call it saving the planet. The result looks the same from where we’re standing.”
The concern isn’t abstract. Lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper, the building blocks of batteries and solar infrastructure, are disproportionately concentrated in regions where Indigenous communities live. The Democratic Republic of Congo supplies roughly 70% of the world’s cobalt. Chile’s Atacama Desert, home to several Indigenous nations, holds the largest known lithium reserves on Earth.
Mining operations in these areas have already been linked to water depletion, land degradation, and the forced relocation of communities who’ve lived on the land for generations. The speed of the clean energy push, critics argue, is making proper consultation with affected communities almost impossible.
The coalition is calling for a legally binding international framework that requires Free, Prior and Informed Consent before any extraction project begins. That principle already exists on paper under UN declarations, but enforcement is patchy at best and routinely ignored at worst.
Some green energy companies have pushed back, arguing that without rapid scaling of mineral supply chains, the world simply won’t hit its climate targets in time. It’s a genuine tension, not a comfortable one.
But Indigenous leaders point out that their communities are already living with the consequences of a warming planet, from flooding in low-lying Pacific islands to drought across sub-Saharan Africa. They didn’t cause the problem. They’re being asked to pay for the solution.
Whether the clean energy industry can genuinely do things differently this time, or whether profit and speed will once again override consent, may well define what kind of future we’re actually building.
