Global mining areas targeting materials critical for renewable energy production and other materials

Data produced by Sonter et al. 2020 "Renewable energy production will exacerbate mining threats to biodiversity" <i>Nature Communications</i>. In combination, these three maps show the global extent of areas potentially influenced by mining, according to 62,381 pre-operational, operational and closed mining properties that target 40 commodities (mining property data from S&amp;P Global Market Intelligence, New York, 2018). Maps were created at 1km² resolution, using 50-cell wide radius around each mining property to capture the potential influence of both direct and indirect impacts of mining on biodiversity. The value of each cell represent our indicator of 'mine density' - i.e. the number of mining properties within the surrounding 50-cell radius. We distinguished between areas targeting the materials that, among the many other uses in society today, will be critical for renewable energy production (i.e. Critical Mining Areas) from those targeting other materials (e.g. fossil fuels and fertilizers; Other Mining Areas). The map of Both Mining Areas contains mining properties that we considered to fall into both the Critical and Other commodity types. All datasets are projected using Mollweide equal area projection. See the citation above for further details on methods and to cite these datasets. <br>