By: All Affrica

Cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), essential for global clean energy technologies, presents a paradox for the global energy transition. While the country supplies more than 70 percent of the world's cobalt for electric vehicles and renewable energy systems, mining continues to undermine local health, ecosystems, and climate resilience. Unless mining governance is integrated with broader climate adaptation frameworks - through ecosystem protection, community health safeguards, equitable finance, and robust land-use regulation - the very minerals enabling global decarbonization may deepen vulnerability in producing regions, according to Hassan Alzain and Kibiriti Majuto from the Yale School of the Environment.

The Paradox of Mineral Wealth

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is simultaneously the world's largest cobalt producer and one of the most resource-endowed nations, making it indispensable to battery technologies powering electric vehicles and renewable energy systems. The country accounts for over 70 percent of global supply and hosts around 50 percent of the world's cobalt reserves. The extraction of these minerals is central to the global decarbonization narrative, yet the methods of extraction often undermine climate resilience and degrade vital ecosystems. Expansion of cobalt mining correlates with intensifying environmental harm.

Local communities witness the paradox: their nation supplies the minerals of a zero-carbon future, yet they suffer from worsening pollution, habitat loss, and climate vulnerability. This contradiction underlines the urgency for integrating mining into broader climate adaptation frameworks.

Environmental and Human Health Impacts of Cobalt Mining

Scientific studies in and around Kolwezi and Katanga provinces have found heavy metal pollution in soils, groundwater, and even human tissue, including cobalt, manganese, and uranium well above safe thresholds. A key longitudinal study documents that children and adults in mining communities have higher bioaccumulation levels and associated health complications such as renal, neurological, and developmental disorders.

Local communities where cobalt is produced suffer from worsening pollution, habitat loss, and climate vulnerability, underlining the urgency for integrating mining into broader climate adaptation frameworks.

Advanced research also highlights reproductive health issues among women in mining zones: miscarriages, irregular menstruation, urogenital infections, and skin disorders, affected over half of the interviewed women. This is linked to acidified waters contaminated by mining effluent.

A complementary investigation published in Nature Sustainability underscores how artisanal and small-scale mining operations frequently discharge untreated waste into agricultural lands, severely undermining food security and intensifying hunger in a war-stricken region.

The health impacts are aggravated by chronic poverty, weak infrastructure, and limited access to healthcare. The loss of agricultural productivity further increases malnutrition and disease vulnerability. Airborne particulates from mechanized mining exacerbate chronic respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, compounding public health burdens.

Mining Driven Deforestation and Biodiversity Loss

Mining roads and related infrastructure open intact forests to logging, agriculture, and settlement expansion. Research demonstrates that mining contributes indirectly to substantial forest conversion beyond the mine footprint itself. The Congo Basin holds over twenty-three billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in its forests, making deforestation a driver of carbon loss.

Biodiversity is severely impacted, and scientific surveys show accelerating habitat fragmentation in the Okapi Wildlife Reserve and surrounding peat swamp forests. Mercury contamination from illegal gold mining has been detected in rivers and soil, threatening endemic species such as gorillas, bonobos, and endemic bird populations. The complex interplay of mining, deforestation, and hydrological change disrupts ecosystem services crucial to local communities.

Climate Vulnerability in the Heart of the Rainforest

DRC ranks among the least prepared countries for climate change despite vast carbon storage forest. The nation faces mounting floods, drought, and landslide risks. A resilience assessment demonstrates that climate shocks disproportionately affect children and rural communities.

Surveys of smallholder farmers in the Itombwe Mountains reveal declining rainfall predictability, rising temperatures, and crop failures. Adaptation strategies like agroforestry, irrigated gardens, and livelihood diversification are emerging, but a lack of institutional support and climate data limits their scalability. Agricultural yields may decline by zero to twenty-five percent by 2050 under warming and erratic precipitation.

Hydropower infrastructure, vital for energy access, is increasingly vulnerable to altered precipitation regimes. Prolonged dry spells reduce reservoir inflow, while extreme rain events cause flooding, interrupting generation and risking infrastructure failure.

How Mining Undermines Climate Adaptation

Weakened Adaptive Capacity: Widespread poverty and fragile governance undermine DRC's ability to adapt. Despite mining generating significant export revenues, there is scant reinvestment in social or climate resilience infrastructure. Environmental degradation from mining erodes ecosystem services such as water purification, soil fertility, and forest buffers that would otherwise support adaptation. Conflicts linked to resource wealth compound vulnerability, and hazardous and exploitative labor conditions in both artisanal and industrial mining reduce community stability and resilience.

Discord with National Adaptation Frameworks: DRC's National Adaptation Plan and prior strategies emphasize multisectoral responses to climate risk. Yet, Environmental Impact Assessments for mining rarely integrate cumulative climate risk, ecosystem thresholds, or community vulnerability mapping. Coordination between the mining, forestry, and water ministries remains weak, allowing land use approvals in peatland and protected ecosystems.

Without enforcing alignment between mining approvals and Nationally Determined Contributions, the country risks undermining its adaptation goals while accelerating carbon emissions.

A Framework for Climate-Smart Mining and Adaptation

Climate Smart Regulations and Land Use Zoning: Zones such as the Okapi Reserve and Cuvette Centrale peatland complex should be strictly off limits to extractive industries. Current protection covers only a small portion of peatland carbon stocks, leaving vast areas vulnerable to industrial encroachment. Buffer zones, zoning laws, and licensing restrictions are vital to preserve carbon sinks and biodiversity.

Ecosystem-Based Adaptation: Restoring Forest buffers near mining sites stabilizes soils, limits runoff, and sustains biodiversity while enhancing flood and drought resilience. Research shows how intact peatlands regulate hydrology and store carbon. Indigenous knowledge from Ituri and Tshopo communities offers guidance on ecosystem-based management and restoration.Such ecosystem-based adaptation measures not only mitigate environmental harm but also support livelihoods by sustaining fisheries, non-timber forest products, and local agriculture. Developing and maintaining a national database of unused or abandoned mining sites could further strengthen these efforts, enabling better tracking, restoration of forest buffer zones, and more effective ecosystem-based management strategies.

Strengthened Environmental Health Oversight: Robust monitoring of water and air quality is essential. Implementation of World Health Organization guidelines and national environmental standards is recommended to be enforced. Health outreach programs need to address metal exposure risk, contaminated water and food insecurity. Mining operators must be mandated to remediate tailings and restore affected lands.Environmental assessments should also be transparent, participatory, and robustly audited. The United Nations panel on critical minerals has called for guidelines to curb human development and environmental violations. Experts on critical minerals are further urging enforceable national guidelines to prevent environmental damage and human rights abuses, reinforcing that responsible mining is central to both climate action and community resilience for all nations across the globe.

Financing Mechanisms and Equitable Benefit Sharing: Although initiatives such as the Central African Forest Initiative pledged 500 million dollars between 2021 and 2031, only a fraction has been disbursed to the DRC, undermining forest protection targets. Climate finance tools such as REDD+ programs, adaptation funds, and community forest leases have been proposed as mechanisms to empower local stewardship and secure management rights in exchange for preserving carbon ecosystems. However, local coalitions are highly critical of initiatives such as REDD+ and carbon credits, arguing that they often reproduce injustice and fail to benefit frontline communities. Their opposition underlines the need for careful redesign of climate finance so that it genuinely supports communities living with the consequences of mining.

Data Driven Risk Assessment: Integrated risk modelling that accounts for climate vulnerability, watershed integrity, ecosystem thresholds, and social exposure would align mining project approvals with adaptation goals. These cascade risk frameworks can guide evidence-based decisions, ensuring mining does not compromise climate resilience.This approach requires collaboration between scientists, policymakers, NGOs, and Indigenous communities to generate spatially explicit, real-time data for decision making, including tracking land under protection, tree logging, active and abandoned mining sites, and other high-risk exploitation zones.

Global Demand and the Climate Justice Dilemma

The global demand for critical minerals often overlooks the environmental and social costs of extraction in the DRC. International supply chains have been criticized for perpetuating injustice when sourcing cobalt under exploitative conditions. The United Nations is working on voluntary guidelines to mitigate rights and environmental abuses in critical mineral supply chains. Consumers and governments must insist on climate-resilient, socially accountable mining that puts the environment and people first. Without strong regulation and ethical sourcing standards, critical minerals risk becoming a legacy of ecological and human inefficiencies.

The global demand for critical minerals often overlooks the environmental and social costs of extraction.

As a representative from local coalitions powerfully stated: "What does it mean when mining brings increased poverty where the minerals are mined? The tragedy that is happening in the Congo is a shame for humanity. It is a failure for our world. We produce more than 70% of the cobalt for the whole world, but go and see where the cobalt is being mined, and you will witness the abysmal living standard of the people, and you will be shocked. The big challenge is, how can we as a global community ensure that the critical minerals that are needed for the entire world bring prosperity for everyone, starting with the people living where the mining is done?"

Rethinking "Critical Minerals" Through an Adaptation Lens

In the Congo, cobalt extraction threatens to compromise the very climate systems it promises to enable. Without embedding mining within adaptation frameworks through strong regulation, ecosystem safeguards, health monitoring, finance, and data, mineral wealth becomes a curse, deepening climate vulnerability rather than alleviating it. The DRC's National Adaptation Plan and NDC outline a path to integrated resilience, but implementation requires alignment between extractive industries and adaptation priorities. As the world prepares for COP30—the "COP of Solutions"—mining-rich nations like the DRC will be under growing scrutiny to ensure that critical mineral extraction aligns with climate adaptation and social equity goals. Turning that path into practice demands treating mining as central, not marginal, to climate strategy. Otherwise, the minerals meant to heal the planet could leave one of its most vulnerable nations paying the highest price.