Extractivism Talks #07: “Natural Resources in the Global Paths towards Sustainability”

Shifting production and consumption patterns away from fossil fuels towards renewables and the growing importance of new strategic raw material resources like cobalt, lithium and rare has been quickly assuming a central role in the policy agendas of many countries. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have exposed the vulnerabilities in global supply chains, reinforcing the urgency of more sustainable patterns of production, trade, and consumption. This roundtable aims to initiate a debate, viewed through different local, regional, and international lenses, on how decarbonisation will trigger a profound modification of current social-technological regimes, formal regulations and policies, institutions, connectivity grids, energy infrastructure and mindsets of production and consumption.

Ramón Pichs-Madruga is a Cuban climatologist and a researcher of the socio-economic aspects of environmental protection and sustainable development. He was elected one of the three IPCC Vice-Chairs in July 2023. He has been Director at the Centre for World Economy Studies (CIEM) in Cuba since 2013 and an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Havana since 2004.

Constanze Veeh is working for the European Commission’s Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs. Her work focuses on critical raw materials, foresight and monitoring. She coordinated the 2nd and 3rd Raw Materials Scoreboard and the European Commission's 2023 Study on Critical Raw Materials for the EU.

Hanna Pilgram is part of the PowerShift team, an organisation for a just ecological world economy with expertise in international trade, raw materials and climate policy. She works a the  Raw Materials Policy Team, focusing particularly on German policy, raw materials turnaround and deep sea mining. Since March 2020, she has been working as coordinator of the Raw Materials Working Group and is committed to making German raw materials policy more globally just and democratic.

Government Representative, t.b.a.