The US condemned the genocide and military rule there, but now that Trump craves its rare earths, that’s all changed. For democracy activists, that’s a disaster

Marco Rubio was once adamant that the US had to do everything in its power to end what he described as the “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya in Myanmar. In a 2017 letter he signed along with 20 other US senators, Rubio called for “strong multilateral sanctions against specific senior Burmese military officials associated with the gross human rights abuses”. Those responsible for the atrocities should be prosecuted, he argued.

In the years since, the Myanmar military’s crimes have only increased. What was then deemed ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is now widely viewed, including by the US, as genocide. What little democracy existed in Myanmar was eradicated in 2021 when Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested and imprisoned and her party’s election victory overturned, and the military took full control.

In the Atacama desert, the extraction of lithium – so crucial to addressing the climate crisis – comes with escalating social and environmental costs

A high-altitude desert plateau traverses Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. I am on the Chilean side, sitting in a Jeep along with two other researchers. The afternoon air is thin and brisk but the sun is piercing – a combination I am familiar with from years of living and travelling in South America’s Andean range.

The landscape is a study in contrasts and contours: broad basins suddenly cut off by sweeping curves; flat expanses sliced by near vertical ascents. The Licancabur volcano looms large above us. Vegetation and humidity levels change rapidly with the rising altitude, bringing cooler temperatures, wetter air and denser plant life.

The Norwegian government has given a permit to a mining company to release waste into Førde fjord despite a 17-year battle by campaigners and a supreme court ruling against it

Shortly after the Norwegian stock market closed on 17 June 2026, a few dozen local people from the small west coast town of Vevring crowded around a laptop in a school. Surrounded by children’s drawings and windows looking out over Førde fjord, they listened as news arrived from Oslo. Norway’s supreme court had ruled against its government: a permit to release mining waste directly into the fjord two miles upstream was illegal, the court said.

The moment marked the end of a 17-year fight, one of Norway’s most protracted environmental battles in living memory. In Oslo, Ingvild Fonn Asmervik, the project leader for Naturvernforbundet (Friends of the Earth Norway), compared the joy she felt to giving birth to her child. For Anne-Line Thingnes Førsund, a third-generation fisher living on the banks of the fjord in Vevring and a volunteer for the charity’s local branch, it was more of a relief. Like a mountain lifting off her shoulders, she said.

Trump himself has acknowledged the US need for Canadian aluminum – and has largely exempted metals from new tariffs

As trade talks with Canada shambled toward collapse in late August, Donald Trump brayed on Truth Social: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” But in fact, Canada, like China, has something the US needs badly: critical metals that undergird modern military technology.

Canada is the United States’s biggest foreign source of minerals, supplying about $47bin worth each year. Sixty per cent of all the aluminum the US uses each year, for instance, comes from Canada, where mighty, remote rivers provide smelting plants vast quantities of cheap, low-carbon electricity. The US military uses the lightweight metal for everything from shell casings to ship hulls and aircraft fuselage. The Pentagon’s cutting-edge F-35 fighter jet’s airframe is about 40% aluminum. “This country desperately needs aluminum,” Trump complained last month. “We get it all from Canada for the most part, and we need it badly.”

Ursula von der Leyen has opened door for Canada to become associate member to deepen links in ‘openly hostile world’

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, has been advocating closer alignment with “middle powers” since January in the face of recklessness in Washington.

But what should worry another middle power, the UK, is that it was Brussels that came up with Wednesday’s big reveal in Strasbourg.

Gabna community fear their traditional herding routes will be sacrificed as far-right rhetoric ramps up against them

For the Swedish-Sami politician Åsa Larsson Blind, it was something of a watershed moment in the national conversation around Indigenous rights.

In late April and May, as the country geared up for this month’s elections, the deputy prime minister and energy minister, Ebba Busch, gave a series of speeches and articles publicly attacking the Sami’s rights to graze reindeer herds on their ancestral lands. Reindeer husbandry, Busch said at one press conference, “is an industry that affects very large areas, but has limited economic significance”.

Outsourcing the industry to China cannot continue, but Europe knows it can no longer count on the US for a solution

The alarm sounded 16 years ago. In 2010, China blocked exports of key rare earths to Japan in a row over disputed islands in the East China Sea. The critical minerals are essential to everything from advanced weaponry and iPhones to electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines, so the rest of the world took note. But it didn’t take much action. China still accounts for about 70% of rare-earth mining globally and 90% of separation and processing.

Then, last year, Beijing forced Donald Trump to back away from his trade war – not with its retaliatory tariffs, but the curbing of rare-earth exports. A scramble for new supplies began in earnest. The year-long trade truce is due to expire in November. The price of erbium, an element essential to communications infrastructure, has already jumped because of fears that export controls will soon be renewed.

From Nevada to Manchester, developers are trialling innovative solutions to clean energy’s biggest challenge

In the deserts of the United Arab Emirates a sprawling clean energy project, stretching across an area roughly the size of 12,600 football fields, will play host to a breakthrough allowing solar energy to power the equivalent of half a million homes through the night.

The Gulf state has been steadily combining 5.2GW of solar power capacity with 19GWh of battery storage to create the largest battery scheme in the world.

At world-first Santa Marta climate meeting, delegates say it was ‘euphoric’ to finally be focusing on concrete solutions

After a landmark climate meeting in Santa Marta, Colombia, where nearly 60 countries gathered to work out how to end the production and use of planet-heating fossil fuels, what have we learned?

Rush for lithium, cobalt and nickel is ravaging livelihoods, water and health of world’s most vulnerable, UN study says

Critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel are becoming the “oil of the 21st century” as the scramble for precious metals deepens poverty and creates public health crises in some of the world’s most vulnerable communities, a report by the UN’s water thinktank has found.

The investigation by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) concluded that the growing demand for lithium, cobalt and nickel used in batteries and microchips is draining water supplies, eroding agriculture and exposing communities to toxic heavy metals.

Donald Trump says deals ‘end our foolish dependence on foreign sources’, while Japanese PM hails enhanced economic security

Japan has drawn up plans for investments in US oil, gas and critical mineral projects worth about $36bn under the first wave of a deal with Donald Trump.

The US president and Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s prime minister, announced a trio of projects including a power plant in Portsmouth, Ohio, billed by the Trump administration as the largest natural gas-fired generating facility in US history.

JD Vance is seeking to create a ‘trading bloc’ as shortages and climate crises mean a kaleidoscope of rare earths are increasingly jealously guarded

The announcement by the US vice-president, JD Vance, that the country is seeking to create a new critical minerals “trading bloc” is a final, exotic, nail in the coffin of the old global trading system. The era of mass abundance, as supplied by unfettered free trade and global markets – “neoliberalism” – is over. We live in a new world of strategic competition between states over scarce but essential resources, with shocks to supplies from human activity and natural disasters an ever-present risk.

This means recalibrating how we think about our economy: the new economic fundamentals today are resource constraints and climate and nature crises, and these, rather than human activity, will increasingly shape the world we inhabit. Flows of finance and stocks of wealth will matter less than stocks and flows of real material resources.

Other countries are expected to join Project Vault, which US president said would ensure that US businesses are ‘never harmed by any shortage’

Donald Trump has announced the creation of a critical mineral reserve worth nearly $12bn, a stockpile that could counter China’s ability to use its dominance of the hard-to-process metals as leverage in trade talks.

“Today we’re launching what will be known as Project Vault to ensure that American businesses and workers are never harmed by any shortage,” Trump said at the White House on Monday.

Auditor calls renewable energy targets ‘unrealistic’ unless ‘EU ups its game’ in mining, refining and recycling of metals such as rare earths

The EU is struggling to free itself from dependence on China and countries in the global south for critical minerals and rare earths needed for everything from smartphones to wind turbines and military jets.

A damning report by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) in Luxembourg found that the bloc’s targets for 2030 were “out of reach” because of lack of progress in domestic production, refining and recycling.

About 20 countries including G7 states in talks on rare earths including calls for US to guarantee minimum price

Ministers from the US, EU, UK, Japan, Australia and New Zealand will meet in Washington this week to discuss a strategic alliance over critical minerals.

The summit is being seen as a step to repair transatlantic ties fractured by a year of conflict with Donald Trump and pave the way for other alliances to help countries de-risk from China, including one centred on steel.

Swedish producer is trying to to accelerate the process of extracting the elements vital for hi-tech products

It is deep winter with temperatures dropping to -20C. The sun never rises above the horizon, instead bathing Sweden’s most northerly town of Kiruna in a blue crepuscular light, or “civil twilight” as it is known, for two or three hours a day stretching visibility a few metres, notwithstanding heavy snow.

But 900 metres below the arctic conditions, a team of 20 gather every day, forgoing the brief glimpse of natural light and spearheading the EU’s race to mine its own rare earths. Despite identification of several deposits around the continent, and some rare earth refineries including Solvay in France, there are no operational rare earth mines in Europe.

The Colla Indigenous people claim Rio Tinto’s plans to extract the key mineral will harm fragile ecosystems and livelihoods

Miriam Rivera Bordones tends her goats in a dusty paddock in the russet mountains of Chile’s Atacama desert. She also keeps chickens and has planted quince and peach trees and grapevines, which are watered by a stream winding down the hills towards the Indigenous community of Copiapó.

But now the huge British-Australian mining multinational Rio Tinto has signed a deal to extract lithium, the “white gold” of the energy transition, from a salt flat farther up the mountains, and she fears the project could affect the water sources of several communities in the area.

Global Witness says plan to upgrade railway line to Angola puts up to 1,200 buildings at risk of demolition

Up to 6,500 people are at risk of being displaced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project funded by the EU and the US, amid a global race to secure supplies of copper, cobalt and other “critical minerals”, according to a report by campaign group Global Witness.

The project, labelled the Lobito Corridor, aims to upgrade the colonial-era Benguela railway from the DRC to Lobito on Angola’s coast and improve port infrastructure, as well as building a railway line to Zambia and supporting agriculture and solar power installations along the route. Angola has said it needs $4.5bn (£3.4bn) for its stretch of the line.

Commission unveils €3bn strategy to de-risk and diversify supply chains for critical rare earth metals and elements

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The EU is considering legally forcing industries to reduce purchases from China to insulate Europe from future hostile acts, the industry commissioner, Stéphane Séjourné, says.

He made his remarks as the European Commission unveiled a €3bn (£2.63bn) strategy to reduce its dependency on China for critical raw materials amid a global scramble caused by Beijing’s “weaponisation” of supplies of everything from chips to rare earths.

A fragile Cop30 consensus is a win. But only a real bargain between rich and poor nations can weather the climate shocks that are coming

This year’s UN climate talks in Brazil’s Belém ended without a major breakthrough. The text of the final agreement lacked a deal to shift away from fossil fuels, delayed crucial finance and the “mutirão” decision contained no roadmap to halt and reverse deforestation. But the multilateral system at Cop30 held together at a point when its collapse felt close. This ought to be a warning: next year’s conference of the parties must strike a better bargain between the rich and poor world.

Developing countries are far from united on some issues. Over rare earth minerals China sees any move as targeting its dominance, while Africa sees it as essential for governance. Elsewhere petrostates did not support Colombia’s call for a fossil fuel phase-out. Yet the global south broadly coheres around a simple principle: its nations must be equipped to survive a climate emergency they did not create. That means cash to build flood defences, make agricultural systems resilient, protect coastlines and rebuild after disasters strike. They also demand front-loaded finance to transition to clean, green economic growth.

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