Aligning Support for Responsible Mineral Supply Chains for a Secure and Resilient Clean Energy Future

Energy transitions are increasing the demand for responsibly sourced critical minerals to ensure secure and resilient energy systems. Diversifying and strengthening critical minerals supply chains, including through value addition in developing countries across Asia-Pacific, needs to be coupled with innovative technologies and solutions that ensure robust environmental and social safeguards for refining, processing, recycling and secondary extraction. Many resource rich developing countries face significant challenges, such as limited financial and technical support, insufficient enabling environments to facilitate minerals value addition, which impacts their ability to fully benefit from energy transitions and to facilitate sustainable and inclusive industrial and economic development.

The DDW focused on two main areas-of-discussion for enhancing the development of sustainable mineral supply chains in Asia-Pacific: how the strategic alignment of private sector and multilateral support through technical assistance, project preparation, demonstration and blended finance solutions can jointly contribute to de-risking and closing investment gaps across critical minerals-to-manufacturing (CMM) value chains, estimated at USD 270 billion by 2030; and the role of concessional and catalytic financing, pull financing, and multilateral support to enable investments across the (post-primary extraction) value chain (refining, processing, recycling and secondary extraction).

The discussions drew on case studies, lessons learned, results and opportunities from practical initiatives in this area, such as the ADB's CMM Financing Partnership Facility and UNIDO's Accelerate-to-Demonstrate (A2D) Facility, showing how they mobilize innovative solutions and investment, including equity capital, commercial lending and participation from strategic industry partners.