The negotiations were intense, says Julia Peña Niño, the Colombia country manager at the Natural Resource Governance Institute. At the seventh UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-7) in Nairobi last December, behind closed doors, Colombia’s joint proposal with Oman was facing resistance from several member states.
The Colombian government wanted a legally binding global treaty on sustainability and tracing the flow of critical minerals around the world, as it has been pushing in several UN meetings. In the end, it left with a simple three-point nonbinding resolution to enhance international dialogue and cooperation on mineral governance as well as resource recovery from mining waste and tailings.
The resolution tried to close the door on further negotiations, but some organisations say the next UN Environment Assembly in December 2027 could be grounds for considering a potential global minerals treaty.
The intensity of the negotiations reflected “both the urgency to act and the political complexity of addressing the various facets of minerals value chains,” Peña Niño told Mongabay via email. Some observers remain cynical and say national security concerns and economic development played a hand in pushing down the traceability treaty.
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Minerals and metals are unevenly distributed, and for many resource-rich countries they are central to economic development. Governments in these contexts tend to resist anything that could be seen as limiting their sovereign right to decide how, or whether, to develop their natural resources.
John Lindberg, head of policy and government affairs, International Council on Mining and Metals
According to analysts, tracking the flow of minerals is complex work — but may be vital in order to prevent and mitigate the socioenvironmental damage caused by surging mineral demand to feed renewable technology and military industries, such as forest degradation, river contamination and and land-grabs from Indigenous peoples.
Geopolitics, elections, intricate supply chains and governance issues all make it more complex. While broad support has emerged around the need to prevent mining impacts, a traceability system is receiving mixed reactions from UN member states, particularly on whether it should be binding or voluntary.
Colombia itself has extensive reserves of copper, nickel and cobalt that get mixed into the world’s supply chains. Other minerals that are considered critical to the global energy transition, including rare earth elements, cassiterite (tin) and wolframite (tungsten), are also concentrated around Colombia’s borders with Venezuela and Brazil. According to a recent report by Amazon Underworld, these deposits remain largely unmapped.
The country faces “significant challenges regarding traceability, as there is insufficient on-site control,” Bram Ebus, the co-director of Amazon Underworld and a conflict and environment consultant for the International Crisis Group and report author, told Mongabay via WhatsApp. “Customs and law enforcement agencies lack the technological knowledge and equipment to identify minerals that are often falsely declared. Irregularities frequently go undetected at early stages of the supply chain.”
Oman, the other state proposing the treaty, also has many natural mineral resources, including copper, nickel, gypsum and chromite. Over time, its high-grade copper deposits, which were exploited over centuries, had been depleted, leaving behind legacy residues. In more recent decades, industrial mining activities have also generated significant volumes of tailings and waste material, which have led to several environmental impacts.
Some of the main impacts include windblown dust, erosion, sediment transportation during intense rainfall, the leaching of metals into surface water or shallow groundwater and other issues, such as land sterilisation, Imran Shaikh, the managing director of Green Tech Mining & Services, which supported Oman’s Ministry of Energy and Minerals and its Environment Authority at December’s UNEA-7, told Mongabay via email.
To prevent and mitigate the socioenvironmental impacts of mining, Niño told Mongabay that an international agreement that includes traceability and due diligence mechanisms throughout the entire mineral supply chain is critical.
But achieving full traceability across the mineral supply chain is facing several challenges.
How to build out a traceability system
To ensure that mineral supply chains are sustainable, analysts say traceability is critical. Traceability can help authorities prevent and crack down on corruption, money laundering, environmental crime and human rights abuses. However, this did not make it into the final resolution at UNEA-7 and civil society groups continue to push a tracking mechanism in the treaty.
A robust global traceability system would need to track various types of information about a mineral. This includes its geographical route from the mine, through processing to the final product. It also includes its chain of custody, which refers to the various entities that have held the product throughout the supply chain, as well as its physical evolution, including processing and transformation.
But once materials are mixed together in the global market, traceability becomes more challenging, Tommi Kauppila, a research professor for the Geological Survey of Finland, which provided Finland’s Ministry of the Environment with expert support on the minerals resolution at UNEA-7, told Mongabay.
“One company that needs raw materials buys it from here and from there on the international raw materials market,” Kauppila explained. “There is this tendency for the streams to mix, and then it becomes more difficult to follow. It’s not a single-source material anymore.”
According to John Lindberg, the head of policy and government affairs at the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), many of the minerals and metals in circulation today contain no origin data, having been mined decades or centuries ago. Therefore, recycling adds “another layer of complexity.”
To make traceability binding, the treaty faces a money question. Lindberg told Mongabay via email that there is still no strong commercial incentive for full traceability.
He explained that full traceability is expensive and complicated to implement, and there is not yet enough price premium or consistent customer demand to justify the investment. The Colombian and Omani governments did not yet share how the plan would be financed by the time of publication, though some sources suggested it could be carried out within the regular UNEP budget.
The EU’s deforestation-free products regulation (EUDR), a legislative tool that aims to curb commodities supply chain-related deforestation at the international level, is an example of a multilateral initiative that has also faced significant pushback and challenges. In December, the EU Parliament voted to delay the regulation for a second year in a row, pushing it to December 2026.
This was in response to mounting pressure from several member states, global business partners and the industry, which complained about the lack of preparedness to comply with the strict requirements, which include full source traceability. In response to their concerns, the EU Parliament has also voted to simplify traceability requirements within the EU
“As a result, full traceability across the entire system is unrealistic,” Lindberg said. “What is achievable is greater traceability going forward, alongside clear limits on what can and cannot be known because of legacy materials.”
Along with traceability in the supply chain, the treaty needs to also have a due diligence component, says Erica Westenberg, the director of governance programs at Natural Resource Governance Institute. She told Mongabay over a video call that there has to be “a really strong set of norms and best practices that you are evaluating and ensuring to meet high standards at every step in that chain across all of those actors.”
In some cases, Lindberg said, actors benefit from opacity and actively resist greater transparency. This includes corporations but also armed groups, which control extraction and trade and are responsible for human rights abuses and environmental destruction.
Westenberg told Mongabay that because minerals travel across borders, “You need mechanisms that actors and jurisdictions across the globe are willing to participate in and adhere to,” but the mood during the negotiations is currently making that unlikely.
Political calculation
Colombia and Oman’s original proposal was rejected by a broad group of states, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, Chile and Uganda.
What the two states pushed for and got instead was a nonbinding resolution to enhance international dialogue and cooperation on mineral governance as well as resource recovery from mining waste and tailings. Traceability did not make it into the final resolution at UNEA-7. Other member states, such as the EU, welcomed this final outcome.
“We think that minerals and metals mining should be part of the United Nations Environment Assembly and the United Nations Environment Programme,” Kauppila said. “The European Union, for instance, and anyone else in the world, is not self-sufficient when it comes to mineral raw materials. This is why these kinds of global discussions are so important.”
Mongabay reached out to the countries that rejected the original proposal to seek their position but did not receive a response by the time of publication. Observers at UNEA-7 told Mongabay that the concerns raised at the meeting were mixed, but many resource-rich nations are wary about any decisions that might restrict economic development and infringe on their rights to resources within their countries.
“Minerals and metals are unevenly distributed, and for many resource-rich countries they are central to economic development,” Lindberg said. “Governments in these contexts tend to resist anything that could be seen as limiting their sovereign right to decide how, or whether, to develop their natural resources.”
In January 2026, the US government withdrew from dozens of international organisations, conventions and treaties it said were contrary to the country’s interests. This decision affected 31 UN agencies, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and four out of the five UN regional commissions that are considered key platforms for multilateral cooperation. It also stepped back from negotiations on all UNEA resolutions, decisions and the ministerial declaration.
The US criticised UNEA for its focus on “contentious and irrelevant issues” and “pushing an agenda of soft global governance via the Sustainable Development Goals, promoting vague redistributions of wealth, or purporting to direct international financial institutions in ways that undermine both their independence as separate international organisations and our sovereignty.”
According to Lindberg, multilateralism is under strain, and initiatives like the global treaty on critical minerals can fall through the cracks.
“Minerals — particularly those labelled ‘critical’ — are increasingly framed through national and economic security lenses. That makes consensus-based negotiations extremely difficult,” he said.
Other frameworks on critical minerals are seeking to move towards accelerating investment rather than sustainability. Ahead of a critical minerals summit on February 4, 2026, the US State Department is encouraging partners and mineral-rich states to sign a Framework Agreement on Cooperation on Critical Minerals Sourcing and Processing. This non-binding framework lays out a coordinated policy to hasten investment, reduce reliance on Chinese supply chains and provide a roadmap for capital and policy support.
Westenberg described the current global political environment as “really challenging,” but she said there are still signs of progress towards sustainability. Around the world, more than 100 voluntary mining standards have been developed, such as the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance and the ICMM.
“That is probably the reality in this current environment,” she added. “Over time, hopefully, ideally, things converge around a single norm or a single standard. But the reality of what we’re in right now is a patchwork of approaches, and we need to push each one of them to be as good as possible.”
Since 2023, four large associations, which include the Copper Mark, ICMM, the Mining Association of Canada (MAC) and the World Gold Council (WGC), have worked together to consolidate their well-established standards into one voluntary global standard, known as the Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative.
“It reduces complexity and clarifies responsible practices for mining companies of all sizes, across all locations and commodities,” Lindberg said. “Broad adoption would give the Standard the widest coverage of any voluntary mining standard to date.”
However, some sources say the general mood in the negotiation room was that there are perhaps too many instruments regarding sustainable and environmental mining — many of which are voluntary and include existing resolutions in the UNEA. This nonbinding treaty — if it doesn’t include a traceability component — would be very similar to existing sustainability measures.
Meanwhile, Shaikh said Oman remains confident that “through continued engagement with UNEP and member states, the dialogue can evolve into clearer guidance, shared principles, and eventually stronger international norms, grounded in real-world implementation rather than abstract commitments.”
This story was published with permission from Mongabay.com.
