Excellencies, Dear colleagues and friends,
Thank you for an extremely rich exchange and your engagement.
Every wind turbine, every electric vehicle, every solar grid rests on something that was, until recently, in the ground.
Ground held by a community. Ground shaped by an ecosystem. Ground governed by a country.
As demand for the minerals of the transition scales — copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, rare earths — what happens on that ground will decide whether this transition sets a new standard, or reproduces the patterns of the old extractive economy.
I have the honour to speak on behalf of the co-chairs of the UN Task Force on Critical Energy Transition Minerals.
A vision for our work that was set out by the Secretary-General's Panel, in the form of seven principles:
- respect for human rights;
- environmental stewardship;
- justice and equity for communities and Indigenous Peoples;
- development through benefit sharing, value addition and diversification;
- responsible investment, finance and trade;
- transparency and accountability;
- and multilateral and international cooperation.
The Task Force translates that vision from principle into practice, from report into policy, from consensus into country-level delivery.
We do this by aligning existing UN capacity behind a common objective: that this transition strengthens the countries, communities and ecosystems from which it draws its resources, rather than deplete them.
The moment we live in gives that task its urgency.
We are living through one of the largest energy investment surges in modern history, driven by the transition itself and by the rise of AI.
But a surge of this scale, on a supply base this concentrated, brings sharp volatility with it — swinging prices, retreating finance, rules written faster than the countries most affected can understand and shape them.
Locally, the pressure lands elsewhere: on communities carrying the costs of extraction, on ecosystems under strain, on legacies of commodity dependence still unresolved.
Few places in the multilateral system hold all of these dimensions — economic, environmental, human, institutional — in a single agenda. This Task Force is one of them.
The work already underway reflects the ambition.
Five technical clusters are in motion:
- on value addition and diversification;
- on traceability, transparency and accountability;
- on mining legacies; on artisanal and small-scale mining;
- and on circularity and material efficiency.
Together they have convened close to 350 experts, coming from more than twenty-five countries.
Two knowledge products will be issued between now and the end of the year:
- a global assessment of trade policies affecting critical mineral value chains,
- and a study on circularity approaches in critical mineral value chains.
In parallel, the Country Support Mechanism is moving from design into first-cohort delivery — the instrument through which this agenda reaches ministries, communities and companies on the ground.
Excellencies,
This meeting is where it all comes together: governments, industry, civil society and Indigenous Peoples take the agenda forward together to feed back through the Task Force, into the work of the year ahead.
A transition should be to a better state, a better place. How much of a better place we get to after the energy transition will be measured in the health of ecosystems, the strength of institutions, and the standing and prosperity of the communities whose ground made it possible. Our task is to make that a reality.
Thank you.