Connecting rising electric vehicle demand to potential land use impacts and threats to biodiversity near key lithium mines

Electric vehicles (EVs) are a viable technology for reducing global transportation emissions; however, EV battery minerals, including lithium, are obtained through mining projects that can cause land use change, habitat loss, and pollution, threatening local biodiversity. As EV demand expands rapidly in the coming decades, these threats could be exacerbated. Here, we aim to quantify potential land use change (in km²) and biodiversity threats (in species-richness & species-rarity weighted km² or ‘SRR-km²’) near ten major global lithium mines (three brine, seven hard rock) by 2040 that could arise from increased EV adoption to meet net zero goals. The land use change analysis suggests that brine mines are significantly more land intensive than hard rock mines, with the brine mines encompassing ∼80%–90% of the ten mines’ total land use footprint and having an average lithium land use intensity of ∼0.50 km²/kt Li_{cumulative, 2040}, compared to ∼0.055 km²/kt Li_{cumulative, 2040} for hard rock mines (∼10 times greater). Biodiversity threat analysis revealed that mines simultaneously with large land use footprints and located in regions of high species richness and/or rarity pose the greatest threats to surrounding ecosystems. The hard rock and brine extraction methods’ lithium biodiversity threat intensity is comparable (∼55–60 SRR-km²/kt Li_{cumulative, 2040}), indicating a similar biodiversity threat when considering the net effect of mine land use footprint, species characteristics, and lithium production rate. Ultimately, while the SRR-km² metric is a useful first-order indicator, its sole reliance on land use, species richness, and species rarity leads to an incomplete assessment of lithium mining’s ecological risks. Future work should involve incorporating additional parameters, particularly ecotoxicity, to develop a comprehensive biodiversity threat assessment framework for lithium and other battery mineral mines.