• The IEA’s new Critical Minerals Policy Tracker presents nearly 200 policies and regulations from 25 countries and regions worldwide. These policies address many different goals, including ensuring supply reliability and resilience, promoting exploration, production and innovation and encouraging sustainable and responsible practices.
• Across all countries, policy makers are paying greater attention to critical minerals. There have been over 100 new policies enacted just in the past couple of years. Although countries approach the issue with different goals, there is growing recognition that policy intervention is needed both to ensure that an adequate supply of critical minerals is available to meet the needs of the energy transition, and to ensure that those supplies are developed sustainably and responsibly.
• The Policy Tracker reveals that countries are using different approaches to achieve these goals. Some of these differences can be explained by the position of countries within the supply chain. For example, many countries with large undeveloped mineral resources are focusing on developing their domestic production. However, there are variations in approach between countries that cannot be explained by their role in the supply chain alone. This underscores the fact that policy approaches must be tailored to national circumstances.
• Despite the variation in national approach, one common thread emerges: the adoption and implementation of sustainable and responsible practices in critical minerals supply chains. This includes developing systems that bring further transparency and accountability to the industry. High environmental and social performance are increasingly needed to attract investment and to obtain – and maintain – a social licence to operate.

As energy policy has traditionally centred around fuel-intensive energy systems, shifting to a more materials-intensive arrangement will require consideration of new trade patterns, geopolitical imperatives and other challenges that may not be fully covered by existing policies. Governments can facilitate this shift and minimise supply disruptions by adopting policies that create incentives for companies to establish resilient, diverse markets for the minerals needed, while encouraging better environmental, social and governance performance.

This Critical Minerals Policy Tracker compiles some of the policies and regulations countries and regions have implemented to ensure safe, sustainable, resilient and reliable critical mineral supplies for their clean energy transitions. Policies are organised around three core themes:

• Ensuring reliability and resiliency to guard against supply disruptions.
• Promoting exploration, production and innovation to diversify raw material supplies.
• Encouraging sustainable and responsible practices across the supply chain.

The Policy Tracker provides an interactive country-by-country explorer tool covering nearly 200 policies across these three core themes. While this initial Tracker presents policies from 25 countries and regions (including both major producers and consumers of critical minerals), we intend to expand this coverage in future editions. The remainder of this page highlights prominent examples from our database in each of the three theme areas.