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In the early 1990s, the European Economic Community – the predecessor of the European Union (EU) – spearheaded an initiative to promote international cooperation in the energy sector, particularly with post-Soviet States in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Out of this process the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) was born in 1994. Going much beyond international cooperation, the treaty allows foreign investors in the energy sector to sue their host States in international arbitral tribunals and claim monetary compensation when policy measures and other State action affect their interests. Fast-forward to 2021. With 135 known cases initiated to date, the ECT's is the most frequently invoked treaty-based investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism. As evidenced by a growing body of research, the ECT is obsolete considering not only modern tenets of international investment law, but also the objectives of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), both global texts 21 years younger. The special protections under international law that the ECT gives to fossil fuel investors and their investments go in the opposite direction of what is needed for the world to decarbonize its energy matrix and fight the climate emergency.

The ECT hinders EU climate and investment policy objectives. This piece explores the low likelihood of successful "modernization," the EU's role in convincing partners that it would be best to terminate the ECT, and steps for the EU to exit the treaty and neutralize its sunset clause.

To further and fully understand how to plan for the decarbonization of mining value chains, we need better data on carbon and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, neither consumers, corporates, or financial institutions know the embodied emissions in the products they produce or sell. While methods like life-cycle analysis and environmental product declarations exist, none use a verifiable, comparable, or widely adopted emissions reporting framework capable of sending supply chain signals. To truly reform material supply chains, new solutions for markets, capital, and policy are required. COMET (the Coalition on Materials Emissions Transparency) – an alliance launched at Davos in January 2020 by CCSI, RockyMountain Institute, MIT's Sustainable Supply Chains initiative, and the Colorado School of Mines – is creating a harmonized GHG calculation framework applicable to all mineral and industrial supply chains. To learn more about COMET, read: The three two-pagers on how COMET is working with financiers, producers, and buyers to create a harmonized GHG calculation framework. The blog How Much CO2 is Embedded in a Product? Toward an Emissions Calculation Framework for the Minerals Industry. The two-page policy brief The COMET Framework: Greenhouse Gas Data Transparency to Enable the Success of EU Climate Policy. The report, Comparison Between the IPCC Reporting Framework and Country Practice. This study examines national GHG inventories prepared by Australia, China, Germany, Japan, and the United States, and highlights how the inventories of different countries – though following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories – reflect different choices of GHG accounting methodologies and approaches, emission factors, and categories and gases reported. These choices, allowed under the IPCC Guidelines, result in significant differences in reported GHG emissions, reinforcing the case for adopting a harmonized GHG accounting framework. In June 2021, the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN Climate Change) partnered with COMET to support the development of a harmonized GHG accounting framework.

This study examines national GHG inventories prepared by Australia, China, Germany, Japan, and the United States, and highlights how the inventories of different countries—though following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories—reflect different choices of GHG accounting methodologies and approaches, emission factors, and categories and gases reported. These choices, allowed under the IPCC Guidelines, result in significant differences in reported GHG emissions, reinforcing the case for adopting a harmonized GHG accounting framework.

To further and fully understand how to plan for the decarbonization of mining value chains, we need better data on carbon and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, neither consumers, corporates, or financial institutions know the embodied emissions in the products they produce or sell. While methods like life-cycle analysis and environmental product declarations exist, none use a verifiable, comparable, or widely adopted emissions reporting framework capable of sending supply chain signals. To truly reform material supply chains, new solutions for markets, capital, and policy are required. COMET (the Coalition on Materials Emissions Transparency) – an alliance launched at Davos in January 2020 by CCSI, RockyMountain Institute, MIT's Sustainable Supply Chains initiative, and the Colorado School of Mines – is creating a harmonized GHG calculation framework applicable to all mineral and industrial supply chains. To learn more about COMET, read: The three two-pagers on how COMET is working with financiers, producers, and buyers to create a harmonized GHG calculation framework. The blog How Much CO2 is Embedded in a Product? Toward an Emissions Calculation Framework for the Minerals Industry. The two-page policy brief The COMET Framework: Greenhouse Gas Data Transparency to Enable the Success of EU Climate Policy. The report, Comparison Between the IPCC Reporting Framework and Country Practice. This study examines national GHG inventories prepared by Australia, China, Germany, Japan, and the United States, and highlights how the inventories of different countries – though following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories – reflect different choices of GHG accounting methodologies and approaches, emission factors, and categories and gases reported. These choices, allowed under the IPCC Guidelines, result in significant differences in reported GHG emissions, reinforcing the case for adopting a harmonized GHG accounting framework. The report Carbon Accounting by Public and Private Financial Institutions: Can We Be Sure Climate Finance Is Leading to Emissions Reductions? As reporting GHG emissions becomes mandatory in the financial sector, the methods by which emissions are calculated will grow in importance for their impact on the resulting metric. Progress is underway in both the public and private financial sectors to embed emissions accounting standards, but there is still a long way to go to make them universal and harmonized. This report addresses key developments that both multilateral development banks (MDBs) – major actors in public climate finance – and private financial institutions have made toward adopting and harmonizing methodologies for calculating financed emissions. In June 2021, the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN Climate Change) partnered with COMET to support the development of a harmonized GHG accounting framework.

To further and fully understand how to plan for the decarbonization of mining value chains, we need better data on carbon and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, neither consumers, corporates, or financial institutions know the embodied emissions in the products they produce or sell. While methods like life-cycle analysis and environmental product declarations exist, none use a verifiable, comparable, or widely adopted emissions reporting framework capable of sending supply chain signals. To truly reform material supply chains, new solutions for markets, capital, and policy are required. COMET (the Coalition on Materials Emissions Transparency)—an alliance launched at Davos in January 2020 by CCSI, RockyMountain Institute, MIT's Sustainable Supply Chains initiative, and the Colorado School of Mines—is creating a harmonized GHG calculation framework applicable to all mineral and industrial supply chains. To learn more about COMET, read the two-page policy brief The COMET Framework: Greenhouse Gas Data Transparency to Enable the Success of EU Climate Policy and the three two-pagers on how COMET is working with financiers, producers, and buyers to create a harmonized GHG calculation framework.

In 2011, CCSI began to research how mining infrastructure can be leveraged for sustainable development and in 2013 created an economic, legal, and operational framework to generate shared-use benefits from rail, ports, power, water, and internet and telecommunications. CCSI has published many works on shared use in the mining sector. Those works, along with other mining-related publications and mining concessions available online, ground the analytical framework of this paper, provide insight on the economic drivers of the mining sector, and detail how legal provisions – including laws, regulations, and contractual terms – can forefront shared use. This paper is part of CCSI's larger work on extractive industries which endeavors to make mining more beneficial and sustainable for people, private enterprise, and the natural environment. It sheds light on the legal, regulatory, and contractual provisions that underpin shared-use mining infrastructure and provides non-exhaustive guidance on how governments might strengthen them to advance shared use of railroads, ports, and power. Section 2 provides background information on the basic legal frameworks that underpin shared-use mining infrastructure. Sections 3 and 4 focus on the economic conditions and legal provisions that shape the shared use of railroads, ports, and power. Section 5 concludes the paper by indicating areas for further research.

Domestic laws and regulations are the ideal legal instrument to regulate the mining sector's contribution to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Even so, as a stop-gap-measure in the absence of a robust legal and regulatory framework, governments may consider updating model mining development agreements (MMDAs) or negotiating climate­-related contractual provisions. The CCSI paper Five Years After the Adoption of the Paris Agreement, Are Climate Change Considerations Reflected in Mining Contracts?, published in July 2021, explores whether governments are using, and how they can use, investor–state mining contracts to advance climate goals. This companion piece expands the analysis, by examining risk allocation provisions that are commonly used or could be used in mining contracts and discussing how they should be drafted to clearly allocate the risks and impacts associated with the ever-worsening effects of climate change between states and mining companies.

Many developing countries face an infrastructure funding gap: the public sector is unable to finance the construction of vital public works, such as railroads, ports, and power infrastructure. Extractive industry investments in infrastructure can help to narrow the gap. Non-renewable resources serve as a foundation to construct long-term infrastructure assets that support sustainable development. The rub lies in the fact that mining companies have traditionally followed an "enclave model," building infrastructure for their exclusive use. Although mining infrastructure might eventually be owned by the state, such as through a build–operate–transfer arrangement, the enclave model causes governments to lose the opportunity to take advantage of synergies between the infrastructure and larger national development plans. In turn, shared-use mining infrastructure leverages the investments made in a mining operation's infrastructure to expand benefits to national and regional communities. This paper looks at legal provisions related to shared-use mining infrastructure to support governments, the private sector, and communities in capitalizing on those synergies.

To truly reform material supply chains, new solutions for markets, capital, and policy are required. COMET (the Coalition on Materials Emissions Transparency)—an alliance launched at Davos in January 2020 by CCSI, RockyMountain Institute, MIT's Sustainable Supply Chains initiative, and the Colorado School of Mines—is creating a harmonized GHG calculation framework applicable to all mineral and industrial supply chains. The COMET Framework: Greenhouse Gas Data Transparency to Enable the Success of EU Climate Policy discusses how advancing emissions transparency supports the decarbonization of both mineral and industrial supply chains.

The 2009 Africa Mining Vision (AMV) provides guidance for the industrialization of African countries by leveraging their mining sector. However, the global context has changed since its adoption. As a result, it does not include guidance on how governments should embrace the climate change agenda as an opportunity for better and further industrialization, deeper linkages, and sustainable development. There are many ways to look at the implications of international climate change policy for Africa, including through the increased extraction of minerals needed in clean energy application and the greening of mines. The localization of global value chains – induced by a rising carbon cost and by the desire to build resilience in supply chains in light of increased pandemic risks – provides another set of opportunities. Seizing this momentum will require policy guidance to ensure that the relocation of industries in global value chains occurs upstream (closer to mineral sources) rather than downstream (closer to final consumers). An open acknowledgment of the impact of climate change on the shifting global value chains for critical minerals and the need to broaden the governance framework to include the emerging role of sustainability and ESG requirements should form the foundation for a revised and revitalized AMV. Read our policy brief elaborating these suggested foundations as well as research directions for a climate-smart update of the AMV.

The 2009 Africa Mining Vision (AMV) provides guidance for the industrialization of African countries by leveraging their mining sector. However, the global context has changed since its adoption. As a result, it does not include guidance on how governments should embrace the climate change agenda as an opportunity for better and further industrialization, deeper linkages, and sustainable development. There are many ways to look at the implications of international climate change policy for Africa, including through the increased extraction of minerals needed in clean energy application and the greening of mines. The localization of global value chains—induced by a rising carbon cost and by the desire to build resilience in supply chains in light of increased pandemic risks—provides another set of opportunities. Seizing this momentum will require policy guidance to ensure that the relocation of industries in global value chains occurs upstream (closer to mineral sources) rather than downstream (closer to final consumers). An open acknowledgment of the impact of climate change on the shifting global value chains for critical minerals and the need to broaden the governance framework to include the emerging role of sustainability and ESG requirements should form the foundation for a revised and revitalized AMV.

The green energy transition will be exceedingly mineral intensive. Manufacturing solar panels, wind turbine and batteries to power cleaner energies is set to significantly increase the demand for co-called "critical" minerals. Such a forecast prompts high expectations in mineral-rich countries and suggests promising opportunities for developing countries. However, the projects to increase the primary extraction of critical minerals rest on bullish forecasts and uncertain terrain due to a number of factors explored in the paper that threaten to leave these investments obsolete and economically stranded. Governments, international actors, and mining advocates seeking to optimize the value of green energy mineral reserve should heed caution when pursuing and promoting the mining of critical minerals. We provide specific recommendations in the paper.

Domestic laws are the ideal legal instrument to regulate the mining sector's contribution to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Even so, as a stop-gap-measure, governments may consider updating model mining development agreements (MMDAs) or negotiating climate­-related contractual provisions. This CCSI paper explores whether governments are using, and how they can use, investor–state mining contracts to advance climate goals. We synthesize our findings and recommendations for six categories of provisions: integrating renewable energy into mining products, reducing deforestation, requiring a climate risk assessment and community vulnerability assessment, regulating water use, requiring tailings dam design justifications, and integrating climate risks into closure plans.