Post-2020 conservation priorities are threatened by global mining

The United Nations has committed to halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030, yet mining remains a major driver of biodiversity decline, particularly in conservation priority zones and areas with high species extinction risk. The accelerating clean energy transition intensifies this conflict, as demand for critical minerals essential for renewable technologies creates unprecedented pressures on biodiversity hotspots. Despite growing awareness, the full spatial extent of current and future mining threats to biodiversity remains inadequately quantified, limiting the effectiveness of global conservation strategies and sustainable development pathways.
Here, we provide the first comprehensive, spatially explicit assessment of mining threats to biodiversity by compiling 145,000 km² of current mining footprints and analyzing their overlap with conservation priority zones (CPZs) and species extinction risks across 14 biomes globally. We find that 34% of current mining areas overlap with CPZs, threatening over 2,300 species, including many classified as critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable. These threats disproportionately affect fragile ecosystems such as Mangroves and Mediterranean biomes. Critically, our analysis reveals that minerals essential for the clean energy transition, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements, show the highest overlap with CPZs and areas of elevated extinction risk compared to fossil fuels, creating a direct conflict between climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation goals.
Future projections demonstrate that without proactive spatial planning, an additional 43% (11.7 million km²) of areas potentially exploitable for metals, 29% (2.2 million km²) for non-metals, and 36% (387,000 km²) for coal overlap with CPZs, highlighting heightened risks from mining expansion. Our buffer analysis shows that inadequate spatial containment could escalate biodiversity threats by 4-54 times for CPZs and 7-562 times for extinction risks.
We provide actionable solutions for navigating this nexus: spatial exclusion of mining from high-priority biodiversity areas, strengthened governance and community co-management, advanced restoration technologies, and circular economy strategies to reduce mineral demand. Our spatially explicit findings offer critical guidance for policymakers and industries to align mining practices with the Global Biodiversity Framework and Sustainable Development Goals, demonstrating pathways to reconcile resource extraction with biodiversity conservation in the clean energy era.