Critical Minerals dashboards
In the past year, researchers in the Resource Efficiency Collective who are involved in the Climate Compatible Growth programme have created three Critical Mineral dashboards.
(1) Mapping regional metal Flows from mine ownership to final consumption
In this project we build over 100,000 Sankey diagrams to visualize metal flows across 159 countries and 4 world regions, covering three key steps: mine owner nationality, extraction region, and final consumption region.
The dashboard was created by Baptiste Andrieu, Karla Cervantes Barron, Mehrnoosh Heydari, Amir Keshavarzzadeh, Jonathan Cullen.
(2) Critical Minerals WebGIS dashboard
The WebGIS Dashboard is an interactive tool developed as part of the Climate Compatible project at the University of Cambridge, designed to visualise the geographic distribution of critical minerals, their geological context, and accompanying socio-environmental data layers.
It supports exploration at three levels:
World view – global distribution of lithium mines, overlaid with several thematic maps.
Regional view – static maps focused on ASEAN and Southern Africa.
Country view – detailed country-level insights with various interactive layers (e.g., copper mines, land cover, population, etc.). Additional layers have been prepared for Zambia. All available mine polygons (obtained from here) are accessible for all countries, allowing them to be overlaid with various thematic layers.
For instructions on how to use the dashboard, click here.
The dashboard was created by Alexey Noskov, Philip Martin Mitchell, Amir Keshavarzzadeh, Jonathan Cullen, André Cabrera Serrenho.
(3) Critical Minerals Supply Chain News Dashboard
Potential disruptions to critical minerals (CM) supply chains pose a significant risk to manufacturers dependent CMs for their products. Disruptions and shocks can occur at any stage of the CM value chain, including during the extraction and refining of minerals, the manufacturing of components, the assembly of products and the final sale of technologies. Understanding the likelihood and impact of these risks can be provided through exploring historical and real time disruptions, as described in news providers. However, no tool currently exists to collate news stories of disruptions, across the CM value chains, and visualize these to aid understanding of the risks.
In response, we have developed a new dashboard to collate stories of disruptions and shocks along the supply chains of critical minerals. (This builds upon a previous version of the dashboard released in March 2024.) The dashboard allows exploration across the entire supply chains of CMs, grouped into three stages:
- upstream stage: mining, extraction and primary production;
- Midstream stage: mineral processing and refining into chemical compounds suitable for manufacturing;
- downstream stage: technology manufacturing and end-use.
The dashboard focuses on the CM supply chains for anodes, cathodes, batteries, solar panels and wind turbines, which have been identified as important in previous research [1], [2].
The new articles are analysed to understand the nature of the disruption risk, using the risk categories from Sun, 2022 [3]. This groups the types of risks into four categories: upstream, midstream, downstream and general, as shown in Figure 1.
The dashboard was created by Luke Cullen, Karla Cervantes Barron, Grace Beaney Colverd, Jonathan Cullen, André Cabrera Serrenho.
