Workers, Inhabitants, and Environments of the Global South Pay the Price of the Energy Transition

This scientific report, based on a recently released comprehensive study, offers a critical analysis of the socio-environmental impacts of the global energy transition. While essential to reducing dependence on fossil fuels — which still account for approximately 80% of the world’s energy matrix — this transition is heavily reliant on the extraction of critical minerals, whose demand is projected to increase exponentially in the coming decades. The production of these resources — including cobalt, nickel, copper, lithium, and rare earth elements — is predominantly concentrated in the Global South, in countries characterized by socio-economic inequalities, colonial legacies, and fragile legal frameworks. In such contexts, multinational corporations benefit from low operational costs and weak regulatory oversight, while the most severe environmental and social burdens are borne by local populations. The report examines emblematic case studies: in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the world’s largest cobalt producer, mining activities expose workers — including children — to extreme health and safety risks, while contaminating ecosystems; in Indonesia, the leading nickel producer, coal-powered extraction pollutes soils and waters, resulting in fatalities within mining operations; in Chile and Peru, large-scale copper projects cause contamination, disease, and the creation of sacrifice zones; in the Lithium Triangle, intensive water extraction threatens both communities and fragile arid ecosystems; and in China and Myanmar, rare earth mining generates chemical pollution, violence, and severe human rights violations. Despite the “green” rhetoric, current patterns of the energy transition tend to reproduce historical asymmetries, concentrating benefits in the Global North while exacerbating inequalities in the South. The study concludes by underscoring the need for a just energy transition — one that ensures traceability and stringent regulation of mineral supply chains, guarantees community participation in decision-making, fosters local value addition, converts royalties into social investments, promotes recycling and reuse, and rethinks prevailing consumption and production models. Without such structural changes, the expansion of clean technologies risks perpetuating extractivist logics, undermining both social justice and the planet’s environmental integrity.