Lithium, cobalt, manganese, graphite, and rare earths are essential for electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable technologies. Currently, the EU is heavily dependent on imports of these materials, particularly from China. To reduce this reliance, the European Commission has designated dozens of ‘strategic projects’ under the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) and launched the ReSource EU initiative to monitor supply chains, provide financing, and bolster resilience.
Under the CRMA, the EU aims to source at least 10 per cent of critical raw materials domestically, process 40 per cent within the bloc, and recycle 25 per cent by 2030. But across the continent, and even beyond its borders, many of these projects are running into obstacles. MEPs worry they undermine the EU’s green ambitions.
A key worry is if enough money goes to the project to meet the ambitious 2030 targets. The Commission announced this month that with the Resource EU, it will mobilise up to €3bn over the next year to support concrete projects. However, actual EU spending on critical raw materials amounts to only 0.05 per cent of GDP. That is far below American (0.2%) or Australian (0.39%) levels.
Belgian economist Peter de Keyzer has warned that the Critical Materials Act, although full of “good intentions,” lacks “action and private money.” Industry groups including the European Carbon and Graphite Association and the European Raw Materials Alliance have called for protected funding, coordinated consortia, and streamlined permitting, warning that without stronger financial and institutional support, Europe’s strategic projects will fail to deliver on time.
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Environmental, local opposition
The projects receive preferential treatment in permitting, environmental impact assessments, and access to financing. As such, the projects have drawn widespread criticism from local communities, environmental experts, and members of the European Parliament since the outset.
Finland’s Sakatti lithium project, for example, in Sodankylä within a Natura 2000 protected area, has received the ‘strategically important’ status from the Commission. The location in a sensitive habitat, however, has alarmed environmentalists.
Last month, Finland annulled four exploration permits for the project. The decisions, originally issued by the Finnish Safety and Chemicals Agency (Tukes), will now have to reconsidered. The disputed permits concerned exploration activities applied for by AA Sakatti Mining, owned by Anglo American. Several environmental groups, including Sompion luonnonystävät ry, appealed the permits, citing inadequate environmental assessments and vague conditions.
Earlier in the year, MEPs Maria Ohisalo and Ville Niinistö (both Greens-EFA/FIN) expressed similar concerns and asked the Commission if it was prepared to withdraw the status of the Sodankylä mine as a strategic project. The Commission responded that “Strategic Projects in Natura 2000 sites are not per se prohibited.”
Land loss fears
Elsewhere, plans to explore and extract antimony—a strategically important metal used mainly in defence, electronics, and renewable energy industries—on northern Chios in Greece have raised environmental concerns. Similarly to the Finnish case, the project overlaps with a Natura 2000 protected forest area.
Public backlash has also confronted the Commission’s strategic lithium project in Mina do Barroso, Portugal. The consortium behind the project, Savannah Resources, says the mine could produce approximately 500,000 electric vehicle battery packs’ worth of lithium annually. Yet the community has it environmental concerns and fears over land loss. Earlier this year, NGOs Associação Unidos em Defesa de Covas do Barroso (UDCB), MiningWatch Portugal, and ClientEarth filed a complaint to the Commission, arguing that the latter “failed to properly assess the environmental and social risks of the open-pit mine before granting it strategic status”.
Yet the European Commission confirmed earlier this month that the project retains its ‘strategic status’ despite these concerns.
Delays and bottlenecks
Permitting delays also remain a major challenge. The CRMA promises fast-track 27-month timelines for extraction projects and 15 months for processing or recycling projects. Yet national authorities have been slow to transpose these rules.
The Chvaletice Manganese Project, located approximately 90 km east of Prague in the Czech Republic, illustrates the problem. The project entails reprocessing a substantial deposit of manganese in tailings from a decommissioned mine that operated between 1951 and 1975. Manganese is crucial for the production of lithium-ion batteries. Europe’s most advanced attempt to produce battery-grade manganese domestically, Chvaletice is to produce around 50,000 tonnes of high-purity manganese sulphate annually, which would make it the EU’s sole local supplier of this critical battery material.
Backed by the European Investment Bank and EIT InnoEnergy, Chvaletice was granted Strategic Project status by the European Commission in March 2024, with a feasibility study published in July 2022. Despite these endorsements, construction has yet to begin. The company continues to await final environmental approvals, grid access confirmation, and clarity on fast-track permitting rules, which have not yet been fully implemented in Czechia.
Projects in Poland and Slovakia have seen similar obstacles in the implementation of the projects.
Lack of transparency
Beyond environmental issues, there are concerns about opaque governance. Financing for strategic projects is coordinated through a permanent subgroup of the Critical Raw Materials Board. Greens MEPs Majdouline Sbai (FRA) Maria Ohisalo (FIN), Ana Miranda Paz (ESP), and Sara Matthieu (BEL) — have highlighted a lack of transparency.
Parliament’s observer status in the board provides limited insight, leaving many questions about project financing, monitoring, and oversight unanswered. MEP Irena Joveva (Renew/SVN) has warned that opaque procedures and limited consultation risk undermining confidence in the strategic selection process, particularly when projects face widespread local resistance.
Governance risks loom large outside the EU as well. Research by the Business and Human Rights Centre (BHRC) found that eight out of 13 strategic projects located outside EU borders will operate in states associated with weak regulatory frameworks, heightened corruption, and governance risks. At least four projects will operate in poor and water-stressed regions in Madagascar, South Africa, Malawi, and Zambia, where new extraction may worsen conditions.
Governance risks
None of the promoters of strategic projects outside the EU currently has both a publicly available human rights policy, including on the protection of human rights defenders, and an environmental, human rights, and social impact assessment for the proposed project. Only one project, the Dumont nickel project in Canada, proposed by Magneto Investments Limited, has a publicly available environmental impact assessment, the study by BHRC found.
The organisation calls upon the Commission to address this: “For projects to be located outside of the EU where serious gaps in legislative and regulatory frameworks exist or unstable political systems prevail, not only should the EU advocate for and support its partner countries in filling these gaps – it must also require that project promoters have sound policies in place to address these risks.”
