We need to have a conversation about conservation
Biodiversity and batteries
This week, we’ve got a discussion on biodiversity by Shyam Sharma. Shyam is a PhD student at Imperial College London in the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment. He specialises in the intersection between technological development and the natural world, focusing on understanding the environmental consequences of extracting electric vehicle battery minerals. In this article, he describes the often overlooked link between electric vehicles and biodiversity, and what should be done to ensure a responsible energy transition.
Since the dawn of the 21st century, electric vehicles (EVs) have become an incredibly popular technological solution to the climate crisis. Initial concerns related to their costs and range have been quelled in recent years, and EVs now make up one in five of all new cars sold globally.1 From Tesla’s offer of “insane”, high-performance vehicles that go 0 to 60 in the blink of an eye to BYD’s pitch of comfort and practicality, today’s EV showrooms have something for everyone wanting to ditch their gas guzzler.
In the vast majority of use cases, EVs produce fewer carbon emissions over their lifetimes than their gasoline counterparts. If they are charged using fully green electricity, their carbon footprints can become even smaller. From that perspective, it seems like a no-brainer that we should have as many EVs on the road as possible, as soon as possible. However, an EV’s journey doesn’t begin when its tyres grind against a motorway for the first time. In fact, its story is intertwined with those of rainforests and coral reefs, flamingoes and gorillas.
Lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, copper. Anyone familiar with battery technology is likely well-acquainted with the importance of these (and other) metals. Massive shipments of them are received every day at factories around the world. Initially arriving as nondescript powders, they undergo a metamorphosis into the compounds that make electric vehicles possible. Those working in battery materials research will have plenty of experience handling lithium metal in a glovebox, synthesizing nickel and cobalt-containing cathodes, or coating graphite slurries onto copper foil for electrochemical experiments. These metals embarked on their voyages far from a university lab or a gigafactory.
From the expansive salt flats of South America to the lush islands of Indonesia, the backbone of modern battery tech can be found beneath the homes of many rare, beautiful, and ecologically important plants and animals. These species all serve highly specific roles in their environments to maintain ecological balance, forming the pieces of the delicate puzzle known as biodiversity.
Biodiversity, in simple terms, refers to the vast variety of species (animals, plants, fungi, microorganisms, and many others) on Earth that ensure both the human and natural worlds can thrive. From the air we breathe to the water we drink, these species provide us with everything we need and more. Any natural cycle you can think of (carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, etc.) is kept turning by biodiversity, each species chipping in like spokes of a wheel. Whether the millions of organisms living in the rainforests or the bees in your local park, preserving biodiversity at all levels is crucial for the welfare of every living being on our planet.
There isn’t a definitive answer as to why exceptionally biodiverse areas and battery mineral deposits frequently overlap. Some suspect it is a case of causality rather than coincidence. Take, for example, New Caledonia, a collection of islands in the Pacific and biodiversity hotspot that also contains some of the world’s largest nickel resources. Here, local scientists theorize that the island’s indigenous plants have developed the ability to accumulate and utilize the abundant nickel in the soil for their benefit – something invasive species brought by European colonizers lacked the ability to do. This allowed the native flora to flourish unbothered and produce an ecological paradise unlike most places on our planet.2,3
Over 10,000 kilometers away, in Chile’s Atacama Desert, lies starkly different terrain. Here, you can find vast salt flats surrounded by the Andes Mountains that contain the world’s largest lithium reserves. Due to its arid climate, this region has long been disregarded as, in the words of Benito Gómez-Silva, “a lifeless territory, worth only for the exploitation of its mineral content.” However, unbeknownst to the human eye, special microorganisms have evolved to withstand the extreme saline environment of the salt lakes that would be hostile to most other life forms.4 These tiny creatures, though unlikely to generate enough interest to feature on wildlife conservation campaigns, serve important functions in biogeochemical cycles (most of which remain a mystery). They also provide food for the region’s flagship species, the Andean flamingo.5
In most cases, battery metals form hard rock ore deposits, meaning the earth has to be dug up to reach them. Lithium is a special case – it forms as both hard rock ores and brine (i.e. the salt flats mentioned above). Brine lithium is pumped from underground aquifers into large evaporation pans that dry off the water, leaving behind lithium salt. While not as outwardly destructive as hard rock mining, brine evaporation often uses up large amounts of land and can pose threats to freshwater resources.
Regardless of how it's done, mining can cause significant environmental damage. It can fundamentally scar landscapes (often irreparably), removing or fragmenting the vegetation and soil that form the habitat of local species. It can also generate large amounts of toxic waste including heavy metals and acids. These dangerous pollutants, the full health effects of which are sparsely understood, can leach into the surrounding soil, threatening the ecosystem and those reliant on it. Even worse, if a mine is located near a river, waste can travel tens or even hundreds of kilometers, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. There is abundant documentation that numerous mines feeding the battery industry have contributed to ecological damage. I don’t believe I can do justice to each of those cases in this short article, so I have included a (non-exhaustive) list of examples at the end for those interested in learning more.
There are tools that can, in theory, be used to help keep the environmental destruction from mining to a minimum. These tools, called environmental impact assessments, are usually developed for individual mines. They involve surveying the species living near a mining area and coming up with strategies to protect them. Local species typically bear the brunt of the damage, so this type of highly localised mitigation approach is definitely needed. However, biodiversity as a whole is a complex, interconnected global system, exceeding the boundaries of any one mine site and paying no mind to regional or national borders.
In the same vein, the electric vehicle industry is a complex, interconnected global system itself. Battery minerals can travel thousands of miles and undergo many stages of processing between being pulled from the ground and becoming EV components. Therefore, to truly understand the biodiversity implications of the EV transition, we need to find a way to link up all the strands of these extensive webs. Can we connect, for instance, a rainforest being cut down in the Democratic Republic of Congo to build a cobalt mine to an EV driving down a highway in California?
The life cycle assessment (or LCA) method offers a useful framework for building this broadened perspective. LCA can be used to compute the environmental impact of producing a particular product (e.g. an EV) or intermediate material (e.g. a kilogram of lithium). It has a wide variety of systems-level metrics including, not only carbon emissions, but also ecotoxicity, water consumption and others. Land use footprint is the de facto biodiversity metric used in LCA. This metric essentially can tell you, on average, how many square meters of land would be needed to extract all the raw materials needed to manufacture an EV.
Land use is certainly a big driver of biodiversity loss on our planet; however, this metric highly oversimplifies the potential ecological impact of mineral extraction and leaves many questions unanswered. For example, where in the world is the extraction taking place? What types of habitats are located in those places? How many and what types of species are living in those habitats? Do those species live in a lot of places around the world or are they confined to a very small region? These points must be all addressed to holistically assess the biodiversity impacts of extracting battery minerals. A generalised land use metric simply cannot do this.
Alternative metrics have been proposed to “upgrade” land use and make it a better proxy for biodiversity impact. These metrics typically incorporate the concept of species richness (the total number of species living in a given area) to weight the land use. The weighted values can then be used to develop models for predicting the number of species that may be threatened when land is used to produce a material or product. Species richness varies across the world (see map below) so can provide more localised information about the ecology of where materials are coming from.
However, species richness is a limited indicator of biodiversity. It is a fairly one-dimensional metric that reduces biodiversity to just a simple count. The function of species in their ecosystems, the rarity of the species, and the ecological significance of species’ habitats are just a few of the other considerations that need to be included. Ultimately, species richness is, at best, at black and white sketch of the multicoloured painting that is biodiversity.
Looking forward, here are my key takeaways on the potential biodiversity impacts of EVs and how we should move to address them.
● Increase collective understanding of the relationship between EVs and biodiversity. There is no silver bullet metric or model that can tell us everything we need to know. We need comprehensive, multi-criteria frameworks incorporating all aspects of biodiversity that can be used for shaping sustainable mineral sourcing policies and communicating the ecological risks of the EV transition. As you can imagine, the murkiness of our global supply chains makes it extremely difficult to identify biodiversity loss occurring upstream from the vehicles we buy.
A promising avenue is requiring EV companies to produce “battery passports”. In these digital documents, they would have to trace the minerals they source all the way back to the mines they originate from, providing transparency on the environmental and social impact of extracting those minerals (info on battery passport). Local and indigenous communities who are on the front lines of mining-related biodiversity loss must also be actively consulted before, during, and after any mining activities take place.
● Empower engineers and technology developers to adopt a nature-centered philosophy. It may feel like what's happening at a mine thousands of miles away has little connection to the work engineers and scientists are doing to advance EV technologies. It is, however, the materials we design and the technologies we build that are ultimately the driver of mineral extraction. Therefore, engineers and scientists have immense power (and, I feel, a moral obligation) to serve as responsible environmental stewards and promote the development of EVs that minimize harm to nature. The recent move away from NMC cathodes in favour of LFP, partially driven by growing concern about human rights and sustainability issues in the cobalt supply chain, shows that, when incentivised, we can collectively work to push EV technology towards more environmentally and socially just options.
● Have more honest conversations about the EV transition. It is abundantly clear that we are lagging far behind on climate action and no one wants to be seen as obstructing decarbonisation progress by highlighting the negative aspects of EVs. However, for our future to be truly sustainable, we cannot accept widespread biodiversity loss as a “necessary” side effect of reducing carbon emissions.
Furthermore, too often the discourse surrounding this issue is reduced to the false dichotomy of everyone having to be simply “pro EV” or “anti EV”. This framing is unproductive and it hinders us from having nuanced discussions about the many complexities associated with changing the way we consume energy and natural resources. We need to dig deeper and center the conversation on how to best build a collective future (of which EVs are sure to be a part of) that simultaneously tackles the climate crisis while ensuring the human and natural worlds can coexist in harmony.
A few examples of battery mineral mines that have caused environmental harm
Indonesia nickel mines
○ Kabaena island (Bajau community)
○ Sulawesi
New Caledonia nickel mines
DRC cobalt mines
South America lithium mines
References
[1] IEA, “Trends in Electric Cars,” IEA, 2024. https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024/trends-in-electric-cars
[2] B. Crair, “The Island Where Environmentalism Implodes,” The New Yorker, Nov. 23, 2024. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/the-island-where-environmentalism-implodes
[3] S. Isnard, L. L’huillier, F. Rigault, and T. Jaffré, “How did the ultramafic soils shape the flora of the New Caledonian hotspot?,” Plant and Soil, vol. 403, no. 1–2, pp. 53–76, May 2016, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-016-2910-5.
[4] B. Gómez-Silva and R. A. Batista-García, “The Atacama Desert: A Biodiversity Hotspot and Not Just a Mineral-Rich Region,” Frontiers in Microbiology, vol. 13, Feb. 2022, doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2022.812842.
[5] G. Gajardo and S. Redón, “Andean hypersaline lakes in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile: Between lithium exploitation and unique biodiversity conservation,” Conservation Science and Practice, vol. 1, no. 9, Aug. 2019, doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.94.
[6] G. Lotulung, “Nickel in Sulawesi: the price of the green economy - Alternatives Humanitaires,” Alternatives Humanitaires, Mar. 21, 2024. https://www.alternatives-humanitaires.org/en/2024/03/21/nickel-in-sulawesi-the-price-of-the-green-economy/
[7] J. Buehler, “Lithium mining may be putting some flamingos in Chile at risk,” Science News, Mar. 15, 2022. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lithium-mining-flamingo-technology-climate-change
[8] “New hope for New Caledonia’s dry forest,” wwf.panda.org, Dec. 12, 2018. https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?340112/New-hope-for-New-Caledonias-dry-forest
[9] “The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species,” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2022. https://www.iucnredlist.org/resources/other-spatial-downloads
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Thanks for bringing this concerns into this space, which is often dominated by views that see EVs as a panacea.
Electric vehicles are part of the solution to climate change. But the size and sheer volume of planned EV production is not sustainable. We cannot consume our way to a cleaner, greener future. We need fewer cars, smaller cars, and more sustainable public transport options. This should be at the core of EU energy transition policy.
At SOMO we have done a lot of work to raise this concerns.
See
https://stories.somo.nl/the-big-battery-boom/
https://www.somo.nl/electric-vehicles-are-a-good-thing-but-not-if-everybody-owns-one/
https://open.substack.com/pub/growingupaspen/p/saving-the-earth-starts-with-us-hope?r=2g93c&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false