By Mrinali Kakamare
This piece draws on a Virtual COP 2.0 panel hosted on 17 October 2026 by Academics for Circular Economy (ACE), The CircLab and the African Circular Economy Network.
Every mine has an end date. A typical mine operates for somewhere between 30 and 50 years, which is roughly a generation and a half, and once the ore has been extracted, what remains behind is largely a matter of choice. A community may be left with roads, schools, skills and new industries, or it may be left with polluted water, abandoned pits and the knowledge that it never shared in the wealth that passed through it.
The clean energy transition is about to run that experiment on an unprecedented scale. Solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and transmission lines all depend on lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, graphite and rare earths, and a considerable share of those minerals lies beneath African soil. We tend to discuss the transition in terms of speed, asking how quickly the world can decarbonize, but the more difficult question concerns what it will leave behind. When this generation of mines closes, what will the communities that live around them, and the children who come after them, have to show for it?
That question connects five debates that are usually conducted in isolation from one another, namely those about wealth, energy, materials, local capacity and voice. With COP31 opening in Antalya on 9 November, each of them deserves a considered answer.
Who keeps the value?
Africa holds about 30% of the world's critical mineral reserves, yet it earns only about 10% of the global revenues that those minerals generate [1]. Most of the money is made further along the value chain, in refining, battery manufacturing and vehicle assembly, which is also where economic and political power tends to accumulate. The International Energy Agency found that the leading refiners, Indonesia in the case of nickel and China for most other energy minerals, captured more than three‑quarters of all growth in refined supply over the past two years [2].
Producer countries have begun to push back against this arrangement. Namibia banned exports of unprocessed lithium, cobalt, manganese, graphite and rare earths in 2023 [3], and in February 2026 Zimbabwe, which possesses Africa's largest lithium reserves, halted exports of all raw minerals and lithium concentrate a full year earlier than it had originally planned [4].
Leezola Zongwe, a critical minerals researcher with the Enzi Ijayo Africa Initiative, argued that producer countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia should make this demand collectively, even if trade rules and bilateral investment treaties provoke an initial backlash.
"We want the refinery to be in our country. And if it's not in our country, then let it be in our neighbouring country. Why does it have to be across the ocean?"
Retaining value, however, is not the same as sharing it. Indonesia's ban on nickel ore exports helped to raise the country's nickel‑related exports from about US$6 billion in 2013 to nearly US$30 billion in 2022, but the same boom also brought coal‑fired smelters, deforestation, water pollution and the displacement of farming and fishing communities [5]. It is for this reason that Zongwe regards processing as a means rather than an end, insisting that mineral revenues should be used to build assets which will outlast the mine itself.
"Beneficiation should be a bridge toward a diversified economy. It shouldn't be just another form of dependence on one commodity."
No energy comes free
The second inheritance is environmental, and it is here that the trade‑offs become most uncomfortable. Around 730 million people still live without electricity, and roughly eight in ten of them are in sub‑Saharan Africa [6]. For these people the transition is, above all, a question of access.
Zongwe did not soften this point. She observed that it is difficult to ask countries in which around 600 million people lack power to slow their development for the sake of countries where a single person may consume many times what an entire African household uses. Her own country, Namibia, is currently exploring for oil, and she described the choice it faces as "a tightrope" between contributing to further environmental damage over the next fifty years and becoming part of the solution.
Dr Lindsay Moses, a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cape Town, approached the question from the opposite direction. Intergenerational justice is usually framed in terms of what older generations owe to the young, whereas Moses asks her own students what they themselves are prepared to give up.
"No energy comes free, no resource comes free. Energy is inherently extractive."
A local refinery may bring jobs today while leaving waste for those who come later. "We never like to think of ourselves, even as young people, as having to care for even our next generation," Moses said, "because we see it as, well, the justice is owed to us." Her advice was eminently practical. Communities that agree on their limits before a licence is granted negotiate from a position of strength, whereas those that begin the conversation only after a company has arrived at their door negotiate from a position of weakness.
Those choices, moreover, are narrowed before anyone has the opportunity to make them. Donors, climate financiers, neighbouring states, former colonial powers and inherited perceptions of risk all shape what young people feel able to propose. When Moses raised the subject of nuclear power with her students, she found that their views were coloured largely by its association with warfare. A bargain between generations can be fair only if the younger party has genuine options from which to choose.
Closing the loop, from mine to dump site
The third inheritance is the materials themselves, which ideally should be kept in use rather than discarded. At present the loop barely closes, since the global economy is only 6.9% circular [7]. In 2022 the world generated a record 62 million tonnes of electronic waste containing an estimated US$91 billion in metals, and in African countries less than 1% of it is formally recycled [8].
Part of the problem is legal. Aysha Lotter, a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town who works with the African Circular Economy Network, set out to study environmental law and discovered that "in Africa, if you want to do environmental law, you've got to do mineral law." The two are governed by separate statutes and administered by separate ministries. Mineral rights are treated as a matter of permits and property between companies and the state, while environmental rights are handled elsewhere, with the result that no single framework follows a mineral from the ground to the dump.
Lotter would like to see laws redesigned so that minerals and the environment are governed as a single system across the entire life cycle. International frameworks are moving in a similar direction. In 2024 a United Nations panel called for traceability "from extraction to recycling" and for circularity targets across the life cycle of a mine [9], while the European Union now aims to source at least 25% of its strategic raw materials from recycling by 2030 [10].
Circularity also alters the calculation for producer countries. If recycling eventually reduces demand for newly mined minerals, an economy built solely upon extraction becomes an increasingly risky proposition, which offers one more reason to treat processing as a bridge towards something broader.
Start small, start local
The fourth inheritance is capacity, meaning the systems that communities are able to run and sustain long after the project funding has ended. Circular economy plans frequently begin at a large scale, with city‑wide collection schemes, centralized plants and complex logistics. Lotter argued for the opposite approach, using community biogas as her example, on the grounds that small systems provide rapid feedback, require less infrastructure and build trust among the people who depend on them.
"If you start local, you start small, and you start with a community that owns the tech, then it will grow."
Local ownership matters for large projects as well. The people who live around a mine are, in effect, its most reliable monitoring system. "They're the ones that are going to be able to say that the water is polluted here because of you," Lotter said.
The weak point, as so often, is money. A member of the audience who researches household biogas in rural Central Java described how adoption rises and falls with provincial grant cycles, a pattern which they memorably called "performing circularity during grant cycles". Zongwe suggested several practical remedies, recommending that organizations fund separate activities through separate grants, apply as consortia, and partner with university research centres. Such measures certainly help, but small circular systems are unlikely to endure for as long as they survive from one grant to the next.
Who decides?
The final inheritance is a say in the future, and each of the other four depends upon it. For Zongwe, this is the real test of a just transition.
"A genuinely just transition shouldn't just change what producer countries produce. It should also change who makes the decisions and who captures the benefits."
She describes her approach as decolonial and is careful to explain that this does not mean nationalism. Rather, it means accepting a plurality of perspectives instead of a single blueprint that is assumed to fit every country, and ensuring that research and policy are shaped by the communities they claim to serve. Moses expressed the same idea in different terms when she said that "we can't have intergenerational justice without procedural justice and recognition justice."
Marina Gavrilaki, Youth Lead at ACE and an EU Climate Pact Ambassador, began from the premise that there can be no fair transition unless everyone who plays a part in society is included. In her view, generations, genders and social classes should be represented in proportion to the share of society they actually hold, and achieving this requires strategic investment on the part of companies and governments, which ought to identify the people who can genuinely speak for each group and then listen to them. She was candid that "the business case is how we get leaders to listen to us," but she was equally clear that being heard is only the first hurdle, and that the second, which is being paid to participate, is considerably harder to clear.
Gavrilaki pointed out that, at almost every COP, the companies that can afford to send their employees to lobby for their interests "are the ones who win at the end of the day", whereas young people are too often left producing testimonials, social media posts and videos that rarely change any outcome. Avoiding tokenism, she argued, means ensuring that young delegates are not simply representing the bodies that already dominate these rooms, and that they are free to make decisions for themselves and their communities. She was emphatic that this "will never happen if you always have young people participating in an unpaid context", and she challenged the persistent assumption that young people are still studying, are supported by their parents and therefore have no need to be paid. Although she had herself been fortunate enough to take part in several volunteering programmes, she maintained that what is needed is a deliberate plan, running from start to finish, which finances the participation of people from every group, and above all those who are most affected, in the great rooms of COP and other major international conferences.
Lucas Meneguim, a researcher at ACE who studies sustainability transitions, described his own contribution as a step back from the question of justice towards the conditions under which any intervention can actually be put into practice. In his experience, the principal challenge of a transition is seldom identifying what needs to change, but rather coordinating the process as a whole, and he set out three difficulties in particular. The first is that societies must intervene in several parts of a system at once, perhaps by creating opportunities for some groups, taxing others and building new infrastructure. The second is that they must understand how those interventions influence one another, since the resulting feedbacks can either accelerate a transition or hold it back. The third, and perhaps the most demanding, is that they must plan across many human generations rather than within a single one.
Meneguim admitted that he had once assumed the main obstacle was a shortage of analytical methods capable of capturing long‑term futures or the connections between different parts of a system. Over time, however, he had come to believe that the real bottleneck lies in the institutions and governance structures that allow change to happen. These, he suggested, should be organized around problems rather than disciplinary silos, should give decision‑makers incentives to think in the long term, and should guarantee adequate representation, not least through participatory approaches. His advice to the young people present was to pursue those enabling conditions as deliberately as they pursue the solutions themselves.
"Let's not only focus on the solutions. Let's also focus on what else is needed around the solutions."
What to watch in Antalya
When the panellists were asked which single change they would make, their answers converged more than they diverged. Zongwe would make intergenerational equity a binding condition of every mining licence, so that companies and governments would have to tell communities, before any project is approved, what they intend to leave behind. In her words, "the question that should be answered is what will remain for communities in future generations when the minerals are gone." Meneguim would push for more participatory forms of governance in which marginalized voices are genuinely taken into account, bringing procedural and distributive justice together, and Moses echoed him, arguing that local participation produces local solutions because it addresses local problems. Lotter would redirect the budgets of end‑of‑year conferences into tangible local projects, with policymakers putting "their boots on the ground". Gavrilaki went furthest of all, saying that "I would really change capitalism," which she regards as the source of every other problem.
The negotiations have so far avoided this question. At COP30 in Belém, references to the risks associated with mineral supply chains were removed from the final just transition text, despite the support of the African Group of Negotiators, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia and Colombia [11]. The parties did, however, agree to create the Belém Action Mechanism on just transition, and COP31, which runs from 9 to 20 November and is hosted by Türkiye with Australia leading the negotiations, is where that mechanism will begin to acquire substance [12].
Five questions will reveal whether the transition is being built to leave something of lasting value behind.
Wealth. Will minerals, value addition and benefit sharing return to the just transition agenda?
Energy. Will access for the 730 million people without electricity be treated as part of a just transition rather than as a trade‑off against it?
Materials. Will recycling and material efficiency be recognized as climate policy, with targets that span the entire mineral life cycle?
Capacity. Will just transition finance reach community‑owned projects for longer than a single grant cycle?
Voice. Will affected communities and young people be funded to take part in decisions, rather than merely invited to observe them?
The panel's guiding principle offers a fitting test for every outcome that emerges from Antalya. Nothing about today without tomorrow.
About this series
Road to COP is a series of articles from Academics for Circular Economy (ACE) leading up to COP31.
Panellists. Marina Gavrilaki (Youth Lead, ACE, and EU Climate Pact Ambassador), Aysha Lotter (PhD candidate, University of Cape Town, and African Circular Economy Network), Dr Lindsay Moses (Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Cape Town), Leezola Zongwe (Critical Minerals Researcher, Enzi Ijayo Africa Initiative) and Lucas Meneguim (Researcher, ACE). Moderator. Mrinali Kakamare (Founder, The CircLab, and Just Transition Coordinator, ACE).
Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity from the session recording.
References
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