The UK has been very active in building new partnerships internationally, including the European Union (EU), Africa, and Latin America, involving research, commercialisation, and trade, according to the Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre Director Gavin Mudd.
In 2020, the UK established economic partnership agreements (EPAs) with 33 African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries covering £15.6 billion of trade. The UK Government intends to expand the EPAs and develop new free trade agreements with emerging economics covering goods and services.
In September 2025, the nation launched a new campaign highlighting the benefits of partnering with some of the UK’s most forward-thinking researchers, businesses, and academics through the Horizon Europe program.
Horizon Europe is the world’s largest program of research collaboration, worth over £82 billion and running until 2027. The program allows UK researchers and innovators to access funding and the opportunity to work alongside colleagues from across Europe.
Speaking to Mining.com.au, Mudd says for the UK, important issues remain the cost of energy, planning and approval processes, and financing – all of which are being reviewed to explore ways to address them in a sustainable manner.
“There has been progress on supporting activity in the circular economy as well as new mines for lithium and tungsten in the UK, but much remains to be done,” he says.
As previously reported, the UK has been playing catch up with the rest of the global economy in terms of its critical minerals strategy. However, the UK Government has revealed that lithium, tin, tungsten, nickel, copper, cobalt, rare earths, and zinc projects are all at various planning and pilot stages. Some of these projects are expected to reach production by 2030.
This news comes amid the UK Government reporting that by 2035, demand for copper is forecast to double and lithium demand is forecast to surge by 1,100%.
Against this backdrop, the UK Government’s Vision 2035: Critical Minerals Strategy sets out an ambition to turn supply vulnerability into an economic opportunity.
Under the plan, the nation aims to meet at least 10% of annual demand for critical minerals domestically by 2035, including producing 50,000 tonnes of lithium per year. A further 20% of demand is expected to be through recycling, while no more than 60% of total supply should come from any single country.
A global effort
Mudd says the development of the growth miners list is a “unique and major policy achievement” for the UK.
“The growth minerals list facilitates the alignment of broader critical minerals objectives with UK policy and funding mechanisms; such clarity was not in place previously,” he says.
“The increasing global volatility of geopolitics will provide a major challenge for the UK and all countries seeking to be proactive with respect to critical minerals, but also the increasing concentration in most mineral supply chains remains a key policy challenge for everyone.”
Critical minerals are key to modern society – with lithium necessary for electronics, rare earths for permanent magnets, and copper being a key enabler of low greenhouse gas emissions energy sources.
Despite the importance of these minerals, the UK currently produces none of the 34 minerals listed as critical in the UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre’s 2024 Criticality Assessment.
However, Mudd adds that in recent years, there has been a lot of work that the Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre (CMIC) has done – as well as parallel projects within British Geological Survey (BGS) and investigating particular regions in detail for their current status and prospects to evolve their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance.
“For example, various projects at BGS have explored ESG in the Lithium Valley in Brazil, the Lithium Triangle across Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia and mining in the Philippines,” he says.
“This reflects the reality that the UK’s need for critical minerals will still be driven mostly by imports. For CMIC, we incorporate ESG into our work on criticality assessment of the UK as well as our broader research work for the Department of Business and Trade and the UK Government.
“As we’ve seen with different parts of the world, better ESG standards are still elusive and not being achieved. There is a long way to go for achieving global ESG standards – but they have to be global and include all countries, companies and sectors.”
For the mining sector, core ESG focus areas include climate change, such as greenhouse gas emissions, water management, biodiversity protection, tailings management, waste, and pollution. On the social side, it involves human rights, labor standards, indigenous rights, community engagement, land rights, and local development.
Meanwhile, on the governance side, it focuses on anti-corruption, transparency, risk management, and ethical business practices.
Write to Aaliyah Rogan at Mining.com.au
Images: UK Critical Minerals Intelligence & Unsplash
