The Environmental Costs of Going Green: Mining and its Conditional Impacts on Local Communities

The global transition toward low-carbon energy and mobility systems has dramatically increased demand for green transition minerals (GTMs) such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper. While GTM extraction is widely framed as essential for climate change mitigation, mining activities frequently cause severe local environmental degradation. This creates a fundamental governance dilemma: do materials intended to enable global decarbonization simultaneously exacerbate environmental destruction at the local level? Moreover, to what extent are these outcomes shaped by political and regulatory contexts? Although existing research has extensively documented the adverse local impacts of fossil fuel extraction and precious metal mining, we know comparatively little about whether GTMs follow similar patterns, and crucially, how such relationships are conditioned by diverse socio-political contexts around the world. This paper addresses this gap by empirically examining the local environmental impacts of GTMs, which moves the debate beyond single case studies while focusing spefically on industrial-scale production, the mode of extraction required to meet growing global demand. We argue that GTMs possess distinctive characteristics that generate competing effects on local environments. Their bulky nature creates larger physical footprints and more intrusive extraction processes, while their relatively low per-unit market value may attract less regulatory attention from local governments compared to high-value commodities like oil, gold or diamonds. Conversely, these same features make GTMs less amenable to artisanal extraction and more likely to be extracted by industrial corporations subject to stricter environmental regulations and greater public scrutiny. To evaluate these countervailing mechanisms, we combine georeferenced data on mining sites with satellite-based measures of environmental change, assessing local degradation through land-use change and variations in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). We first adopt an exploratory approach to examine whether GTM extraction is associated with systematically higher or lower levels of environmental destruction compared to traditional mineral extraction. We then investigate heterogeneity across specific minerals and test how socio-political conditions shape environmental outcomes. Our results indicate that differences in environmental degradation are not primarily driven by mineral classification as "green" or traditional, but rather by local political factors. These findings highlight that the environmental costs of the green transition are fundamentally political rather than technological. They carry important policy implications for the governance of global decarbonization, suggesting that sourcing decisions for critical raw materials should account not only for cost effectiveness and supply security, but also for governance quality and institutional capacity in producer countries.