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" Nature Communications.

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&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.