Governing Rare Earths and Other Critical Materials: Climate, Economics, and Politics

Zoom Webinar

Environmental and economic governance of critical raw materials is an ongoing challenge. The challenges, and the stakes, of critical raw materials governance entangle across multiple scales. Challenges at the international scale are characterized by competing national strategies to secure supply, shifting geographies of extraction, and weak regulatory regimes which undermines transparency and free trade-oriented objectives.

Around the world, national strategies range from unleashing prospecting bonanzas to reducing production to remediate environmental harm, and local issues encompass efforts to recruit mining and industrial facilities as well as fierce resistance in the name of labor rights, cultural preservation, and environmental protection.

Dr. Julie Michelle Klinger will discuss these dynamics by drawing on three domains of her professional experience: (1) several years’ fieldwork in local languages in Brazil, China, and the US; (2) Work on the development of rare earth mining, processing, and recycling standards as a member of the International Standards Organization Technical Committee 298; and (3) Ongoing research to characterize the global informal trade in energy-critical materials using machine learning, remote sensing, and multilingual qualitative research, funded by the US National Science Foundation.  

April 27, 2022

9:00pm      Japan | South Korea
8:00pm      Hong Kong | Beijing | Singapore
5:30pm      Delhi
2:00pm      Paris
1:00pm     Ireland | London
7:00am      Chicago

Speakers:

Julie Michelle Klinger
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences
University of Delaware

Moderator:

Kenneth Pomeranz
Faculty Director
The University of Chicago Yuen Campus in Hong Kong

About One.5°

One.5° is a new UChicago Yuen Campus series that explores this question and seeks answers from global experts from many disciplines. One.5° will highlight and draw attention to the issues, raise awareness and discuss solutions that individuals, communities, institutions and governments should consider to have an impact. We’ll discuss government policy and regulation that is working, how capitalism and corporate behaviors are changing and highlight success stories. Read More