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The EU has identified 47 strategic mining, processing and recycling projects to reduce import dependency on critical minerals such as graphite, lithium and cobalt, whose demand is rising sharply due to AI infrastructure, electric cars and defence systems.
Six of the mines are in Spain and Portugal, where environmental groups are protesting the acceleration of permits amid extreme droughts. Brussels is also planning to revise the EU’s Water Framework Directive to remove regulatory barriers to industry, raising concerns about weakened environmental safeguards.
“Fast-tracking mining in water-stressed regions by weakening safeguards is a form of Russian roulette. It may look like an economic booster in the short term, but one serious failure in the wrong location can neutralise many of the promised gains – especially when the damage to people, rivers, aquifers and ecosystems is long-lasting or irreversible.”
– Prof. Kaveh Madani, the director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health
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In southern Lebanon, 76-year-old environmental activist Mona Khalil was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home on Mansouri Beach.
Khalil’s Orange House Project was not just a sanctuary for endangered sea turtles; it was an operational base that for 25 years conducted legal proceedings and campaigns against destructive coastal development, pollution, and illegal fishing. Without civilian watchdogs, the coast’s biological assets are now completely exposed to future military and elite exploitation.
“There are people who work for conservation, and there are people who become conservation itself. Mona Khalil was one of those rare individuals whose life, spirit, and daily existence became inseparable from the cause she dedicated herself to.”
– Assad Serhal, Director General of The Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon (SPNL)
Read BBC / Lebanese turtle conservationist Mona Khalil killed by Israeli strike.
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The latest figures from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) find that the world is burning at a level not seen since 1945, with 244,600 deaths in 2025 alone.
In Sudan for example, actors do not fight in an ideological vacuum; they exploit civilian threats and forced displacement as precision objectives to control farmland, markets and mineral-rich terrain. The data speaks for itself: the more plunderable a resource is, the longer the conflict lasts, because it funds the autonomy of the actors.
Read NPR / Conflicts are on the rise globally, at the highest level since WWII, data shows.