"The battery paradox: how the electric vehicle boom is draining communities and the planet", 22 December 2020

The transport sector accounted for roughly a quarter of global CO2 emissions in 2019, with over 70 per cent coming from road transport. It is clear that these emissions need to be curbed if the targets of the Paris Climate Agreement are to be reached and catastrophic climate change is to be avoided. But phasing out fossil fuel-powered cars in favour of electric vehicles may come at an unacceptably high social and environmental cost.

Electric vehicles are often presented as the ultimate solution to help reduce emissions from road transport. After all, they run on batteries instead of oil, eliminating the CO2 exhaust emissions of traditional engines. This is why governments across the world are adopting policies to phase out petrol and diesel cars and stimulate massive uptake of electric vehicles. This has already led to a worldwide boom in the production and sales of electric cars, which will only pick up speed in the coming years.

At the core of this transition is the production of lithium-ion batteries. The minerals required to produce these batteries – lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, manganese– are extracted from the earth, just like fossil fuels, and demand for them is skyrocketing. A recent report by the World Bank estimates that demand for lithium, cobalt and graphite could grow by nearly 500 per cent by 2050.

While electric vehicles are widely embraced, the pressure of the great battery boom is increasingly being felt by communities around the world, including in Argentina, Chile and Bolivia – the so-called ‘Lithium Triangle’ countries that host three-quarters of the world’s lithium resources – and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which produces about two-thirds of the world’s cobalt. Issues reported include heavy pollution, water scarcity, exposure to toxics, non-disclosure of sufficient information, lack of consultation and community consent, community conflicts and abuses, impact on indigenous rights, dangerous mining conditions and child labour. The unprecedented increase in demand for these and other raw materials thus poses serious human rights and environmental risks and begs the question how sustainable and fair a mobility transition based on the mass uptake of electric vehicles really is...