The Wakanda Rule: Refine What You Mine and Keep the Change

Within the Marvel Comics’ Black Panther universe, the wealth of Wakanda – the hidden, futuristic African kingdom of the titular superhero—stems not from its vast reserves of vibranium but from its refusal to sell the fictional element as raw material. Instead, Wakanda refines vibranium domestically and uses the resulting revenues and technological advantages to develop and shield its people from external threats.

As a philosophy for resource management, the “Wakanda Rule” provides an elegant template for leveraging increasing global demand for minerals critical to the clean energy transition—many of which are found in large quantities in climate-vulnerable countries—to achieve a just energy transition. In such a transition, the benefits of mineral refining and production, not just its extraction, can help countries protect themselves from the effects of climate change.

Some developing countries, including Chile, Indonesia, Namibia, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, are already curbing exports of certain raw materials and building domestic processing and manufacturing facilities to grow their economies. However, the results are mixed, largely because simple solutions, like Hollywood movies, tend to gloss over the finer details. Indonesia’s vaunted success in onshoring nickel refining, for example, has been plagued by accounts of extreme environmental degradation and a subsequent loss of tourism and fishing livelihoods. 

Africa holds an estimated 40 percent of the rare earth elements and critical minerals that will make a global clean energy transition possible, according to the International Energy Agency’s 2022 Africa Energy Outlook. From the silicon, cadmium, tellurium, selenium, and copper that help solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity to the praseodymium, lithium, nickel, graphite, and cobalt that go into the batteries that store it, the continent is a largely untapped cornucopia of minerals essential for moving away from climate-warming fossil fuels and slashing the greenhouse gas emissions that are accelerating climate change.

Demand for these minerals will likely triple by 2030 and quadruple by 2040, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates. Currently, most critical minerals mined in Africa are refined and processed abroad in Australia, Canada, Russia and the United States. But more than half go to China, which controls about 70 percent of global critical minerals production and 85 percent of global processing capacity. 

Concentrating processing in a single country creates significant supply-chain risks that could disrupt global efforts to decarbonize economies. At the same time, as rising global temperatures collide with a decline in development and humanitarian aid led by the United States, nations of the Global North are increasingly advocating for developing countries to finance their climate adaptation solutions through natural resource development rather than international grants and loans. That only works if a significant portion of the benefits from those resources stays in the Global South, either in the form of increased royalties, a larger percentage of income from revenue sharing deals, or investment in local, value-adding processing.

Africa’s critical mineral wealth offers an opportunity and a solution. Investing in processing capabilities where minerals are mined would help diversify global supply chains, offering alternatives to the processing capacity that is increasingly concentrated in China. The continent’s strategic location between markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia further reduces supply chain vulnerabilities and enhances its appeal as a processing hub. By developing local capacity, African nations could capture more value from their natural resources, drive industrial growth, and help fund climate adaptation. 

Done right, augmenting the value of critical minerals through processing before export —or better yet, developing domestic markets for them—could also help reset Africa’s relationship with its resources, reversing a dark history of extraction, exploitation, and environmental devastation while building resilience in the face of climate change.

Using mineral resources to build a sustainable economy instead of an extractive one requires a complex set of economic, structural, and political reforms. The United Nations, the African Development Bank, and the African Union have all made far-reaching recommendations to help ensure that the green energy transition is equitable and just for resource-rich but development-poor nations. If implemented, these mining policy changes can lay the groundwork for critical minerals to fuel a sustainable transition to climate resilience. 

But getting to a point where such policies can be enacted requires key interventions in local capacity development and regional partnerships. Ensuring they remain effective means, crucially, planning for a future in which mining is no longer viable by jumpstarting the green industries that could take its place. This reduces dependency on a limited resource while opening a path for resiliency, should recycling and reuse become substantive parts of the critical mineral supply chain or technological advances eclipse the need for rare earth elements and other minerals.

These preparatory measures may pave the way for economic development, but they do not generate income in and of themselves—and thus they require supportive funding from organizations like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Green Climate Fund. This UN-backed initiative is designed to help developing countries take transformative action to reduce their emissions and build resilience to climate change. Whether or not mining support could be considered part of an adaptation or mitigation strategy under the Fund’s parameters is up for debate. But helping resource-rich and developmentally poor countries use their own minerals, which are enabling the global transition to clean energy, ticks every single box. That would make critical minerals the vibranium of a non-fiction future for resource-rich African countries, freeing them to build infrastructure and economies that support climate adaptation alongside human development. 

Given the Trump  administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, climate concerns took a back seat to issues of macroeconomic stability during April’s World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) meetings in Washington. Meanwhile, the collapse of the U.S. Agency for International Development and cuts in development aid by other countries mean increasing pressure on international lenders like the IMF and World Bank to step in with development assistance for the world’s most vulnerable nations. It is thus even more important that discussions around access to critical minerals in the countries that have them focus on making sure that the clean energy transition is also a just one. 

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa previewed his nation’s priorities at the upcoming G20 summit, saying that countries rich in critical minerals should benefit most from their exploitation. He promised to secure agreements for more local processing of vital metals and minerals “as an engine for growth and development in Africa and the rest of the Global South,” noting that this will contribute to “an additive rather than an extractive relationship” and reverse a legacy of resource-rich countries in Africa losing out “because the benefit flows out of their own countries to other locales.” 

Maximizing Africa’s critical-mineral-rich nations’ ability to solve a global problem while helping themselves will require three key interventions before ground is broken on any new or existing mines.

1. Invest in mapping.

Mining economist and African mining specialist Gracelin Baskaran estimates that Africa is home to 85 percent of the world’s manganese, 80 percent of the world’s platinum and chromium, 47 percent of cobalt, 21 percent of graphite, and 6 percent of copper. However, investment in mapping those minerals on the continent is half what’s been spent in Canada or Australia. It doesn’t make sense for governments to focus on processing their mineral wealth when, in many cases, they don’t even know which minerals they have, or how much. Mapping is time-consuming and expensive, but it sets the baseline from which all other efforts flow—and is another key area that the Green Climate Fund could support.

2. Build local knowledge in modeling, metallurgy, mining law, and supply chains.

Not every mineral, or even every country, fits the Wakanda Rule. Wet processing nickel, for example, requires vast amounts of water and electricity. Zambia may be nickel-rich, but requiring local processing during a drought in a country whose electricity is derived from hydropower doesn’t make sense. Copper smelting, a less energy-intensive process, does.

To maximize the potential benefits of their mineral resources, countries must understand what they have, what they don’t, what they can contribute, and what they can get elsewhere. That means investing in knowledge and training all along the mineral value chain, from mining engineers to mineral-specific metallurgists who understand rare-earth and critical minerals processing; modelers who can help assess the future impacts of climate change or a global pandemic on those industrial processes; lawyers who can draft beneficial mining agreements; and supply chain experts who can identify opportunities and barriers in international markets.

Not only does Africa have vast mineral resources vital for the clean energy transition, it also boasts a young, STEM-educated workforce. Investment in national laboratories and regional mining centers of excellence would help develop capabilities, technologies, and skills needed to produce refined critical minerals at scale. Vocational and technical training programs could be expanded in collaboration with mining firms to build industry expertise across the continent, further strengthening government and private sector talent pipelines. 

3. Establish and strengthen mineral “clubs” to share skills and resources while maximizing leverage.

Nobody likes a cartel except those who belong to one. While flawed, OPEC provides a possible template for building mineral-specific trading blocs that can maximize skill transfer, knowledge know-how, and bargaining leverage.

The main obstacle to value chain addition in Africa is that few countries have the resources or expertise to do it independently. Those with critical mineral deposits don’t necessarily have the infrastructure to enable profitable processing and refining, such as roads, reliable energy sources, or access to loans due to the high risk that financial markets associate with investments in Africa. 

Banding together would allow countries to combine strengths in different sectors—mines, labor, electricity, water, and technical skills, among others—to better distribute benefits while ensuring that competition for foreign markets doesn’t launch a race to the bottom.

Building a refinery in every country is financially prohibitive—the United States doesn’t have a nickel refinery, even though it produced 17,000 tons in 2023—but establishing a refining node that processes ore from across the region would create economies of scale that make the investment worthwhile. Metals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, could be refined in Botswana and then manufactured into batteries at a production node elsewhere on the continent.

Regional trading blocs such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), or the East African Community (EAC) are a start. Still, mineral-based groupings would benefit from similar needs that transcend regional blocs, especially when negotiating mining and processing agreements that benefit all producers.

These clubs could draw from and invest in regional mining centers of excellence to build networks. An Organization of Cobalt Exporting Countries, for example, might link the DRC, which has the world’s largest concentration of cobalt, with Indonesia, the world’s second-largest cobalt source, to enable further skills sharing and greater leverage for negotiating mining agreements and revenue sharing. Creating OPEC-like critical minerals cartels could lead to price increases, but they would also help diversify production and processing away from China and Russia, fortifying the overall supply chain.

Larger groupings, such as a hypothetical Organization of Critical Mineral Exporting Countries, could combine resources to build locally diversified battery manufacturing facilities for the African continent. A model for this already exists: In December 2022, the United States agreed to support Zambia and the DRC in developing an EV battery supply chain that would cover mining, processing, manufacturing, and assembly in both countries. A binding agreement has yet to materialize, and American financial support is now in question. Still, the prospect of building further value on the continent and growing local market demand for energy transition technology is a solid strategy that also mitigates climate change.

4. Use mining to jumpstart green industry.

Mining, no matter how well regulated, is still destructive and polluting. Ideally, advances in reuse and recycling will ultimately obviate the need for further extraction, but to ensure that Africa’s critical mineral investments don’t become sunk assets, it is imperative to structure them in a way that allows for diversification.

To start, governments should be empowered to craft mining agreements that guarantee that extraction is not the only source of job creation. For example, roads and electrical grids should support local industry and communities in addition to mining activities. This reduces economic dependency by diversifying local employment options, leading to stronger labor and environmental protections. At the same time, investment in parallel industries should be encouraged.

In the mining context, “sacrifice zones” usually denote surrounding communities that disproportionately bear the brunt of environmental pollution and other hazards to benefit a country’s larger economic gain or, in the case of minerals critical for the green energy transition, a greater global good.

While there is no question that the environmental impacts of mining critical minerals should be minimized to the fullest extent possible, some degree of local destruction is inevitable. These sacrifice zones should be turned into opportunity zones through investment in complementary industries that take advantage of shared resources, such as labor, transport, electricity, and pollution treatment, with the goal that these industries will, in time, supplant extraction. For example, co-locate an EV battery recycling plant and an EV battery manufacturing plant next to a mineral refinery and as close to a mine as possible. In this way, a mine’s “sacrifice” zone becomes an industrial site, where mining is just one part of the battery ecosystem. This concentrates the externalities of polluting industries such as mining, refining, and manufacturing, while creating a better-equipped system for adaptation. Instead of simply mining for battery minerals, these sites will also be equipped to mine old batteries for new minerals. 

That is the Wakanda Rule in action: enabling countries to capture more value from existing resources, while laying the groundwork for a future that delivers environmental as well as economic justice.