Valerio Barbarossa

Mining provides essential raw materials but is an increasingly important driver of biodiversity loss. Global mining assessments have mapped mining-driven ecosystem degradation at unprecedented resolution, but linking these impacts to the companies driving them remains challenging. Here, we develop a tractable framework that combines satellite-derived mining land use, geolocated asset-level data, and ecological data to trace mining in protected areas and mining-driven species extinction risks from individual mines to their corporate owners, and estimate the biodiversity footprints of thousands of mining companies worldwide. Mining threats to biodiversity concentrate in the Global South and Australia, with a substantial share driven by North American, Western European, and East Asian corporations, whose overseas biodiversity footprints often exceed those of their home countries' mining sectors by orders of magnitude. In Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, these threats concentrate in countries with weak resource governance, compounding the risk of irreversible natural capital loss with little contribution to local development. Extinction risks are highly concentrated within the mining sector, as certain companies hold projects in some of the most biodiversity-rich and threatened regions on Earth. Comparing our footprint estimates with disclosure-based indicators suggests widespread underreporting of these impacts in the mining sector. Our study demonstrates that coupling global mining assessments with asset-level data can greatly reduce these information asymmetries and enhance corporate accountability.

Wastewater management (WWM) is vital for protecting human health and the environment, yet conventional centralized systems are resource-intensive and unsuited to growing urban pressure. Small and medium WWMs offer a potentially more sustainable alternative, but the lack of standardized life cycle assessment (LCA) approaches limits robust comparison and informed decision-making. In this study, we conduct a global harmonization of life cycle assessments of small- and medium-scale systems across 96 LCAs and 9 treatment technologies. By harmonizing life cycle inventories, we eliminate variability in methods, assumptions, and biases, thereby providing a consistent setting to compare environmental impacts. The harmonization process shows that GHG emissions have been underrepresented in inventories. The results suggest that direct emissions to air are a key contributor to climate change, and decarbonization strategies should focus on minimizing these emissions. Sequencing batch reactors showed the lowest average phosphorus and low nitrogen emissions to water with minimal chemical dosing and low direct GHG emissions to air. Our findings support the development of environmentally sustainable small- and medium-scale water-treatment solutions for municipal settings.

The United Nations has committed to halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030. Despite this commitment, mining remains a major driver of biodiversity decline, particularly in conservation priority zones (CPZs) and areas with high species extinction risk. Regardless of growing awareness, the full extent of current and future mining threats to biodiversity remains inadequately quantified, limiting effective global conservation strategies. Here, we quantify the threats of 145,000 km² of current mining land to biodiversity. We find that 34% (49,000 km²) of these mining areas overlap with CPZs, intersecting the ranges of more than 2,300 species, including many classified as threatened. These threats span 14 biomes, with disproportionately high relative impacts in fragile ecosystems such as Mangroves and the Mediterranean. Furthermore, an additional 43% (12 million km²), 29% (2 million km²), and 37% (4 million km²) of land potentially exploitable for metals, non-metals, and coal, respectively, overlap with CPZs, highlighting the heightened risks from future mining expansion without consideration for biodiversity. Our findings offer actionable insights for policymakers and industry stakeholders, guiding conservation efforts to mitigate biodiversity loss and align mining practices with global conservation goals, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Mining is an increasingly recognized threat to biodiversity, yet the magnitude of its impacts remains poorly understood. Here we provide a global quantitative synthesis of biodiversity responses to mining across freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. We compiled 2,859 observations from 76 studies spanning 94 mines and used multilevel meta-analytic models to quantify changes in species richness and abundance. Mining roughly halved species richness in both realms (48% in freshwater, 59% in terrestrial ecosystems), with significant declines across nearly all taxa. These reductions are roughly two to three times the ~20% average local richness loss attributed to other major anthropogenic pressures. Freshwater species abundance decreased by 75% and terrestrial invertebrate abundance by 43%, though overall terrestrial abundance responses were more heterogeneous. Movement traits strongly influenced freshwater insect responses: taxa with limited female dispersal, no capacity to exit the water, or low-to-moderate drift occurrence declined most severely. Impacts were predominantly negative across commodities, despite their contrasting extraction contexts and pressures. As global mineral demand continues to grow, our synthesis reveals consistent declines across realms, taxa and commodities, identifying mining as a major and pervasive driver of local biodiversity loss that warrants far greater attention in conservation and environmental policy.

Climate change is exposing freshwater fish to warmer temperatures, causing widespread range contraction and population declines. However, how climate-driven disruptions will affect freshwater fish persistence under future thermal extremes remains poorly understood. Here, using weekly water temperature data (1976–2099), we assess the vulnerability of 9,809 freshwater species to short- and long-term thermal extremes and show that gradual warming can trigger abrupt thermal exposure. Tropical regions experience a high proportion of species at risk, whereas non-tropical regions face severe thermal extremes. We introduce the concept of thermal fragmentation exposure to understand how heterogeneous warming fragments freshwater habitat, thereby amplifying local extinction risks. Around 63% of riverine fish will experience more persistent thermal barriers under a high-emissions scenario, with thermal fragmentation accelerating over time. These findings underscore the urgent need for targeted conservation strategies to safeguard freshwater fish biodiversity.

Achieving global decarbonization goals will require substantial expansion of renewable energy infrastructure, including hydropower. Yet hydropower dams fragment river ecosystems, threatening freshwater biodiversity and the communities dependent on freshwater fisheries. Reconciling renewable energy development with biodiversity conservation remains a critical challenge for sustainable energy transitions.Our recent global assessments quantified dam-induced habitat fragmentation for approximately 10,000 lotic fish species across 40,000 existing large dams. Current fragmentation hotspots are concentrated in regions with legacy hydropower development, including North America, Europe, South Africa, India, and China. This fragmentation has severe consequences for population persistence: approximately 3,500 fish species face potential extirpation in portions of their range due to habitat fragments too small to sustain viable populations. Furthermore, planned future hydropower developments threaten to intensify these impacts in tropical biodiversity hotspots, with projected connectivity declines of 20–40 percentage points across species in the Amazon, Niger, Congo, Salween, and Mekong basins.To address these challenges, we propose a strategic restoration-development paradigm that combines targeted dam removal, fishway retrofitting, and strategic planning for future infrastructure. Using multi-objective optimization and species-level habitat connectivity modeling for 710 fish species in the Lower Mekong Basin, we demonstrate how this integrated approach can break locked-in environmental impacts from past ad-hoc development. Our results show that removing 12 high-impact dams increases basin-wide connectivity by 60%, effectively restoring conditions achievable had strategic planning been adopted before hydropower deployment began. Lower-ambition scenarios that do not include dam removal, but still combine strategic planning with fishway installation, resulted in modest improvements of up to 17%. Importantly, restoration-development outcomes varied across targeted species groups, highlighting the need for tailored conservation objectives in river basin planning.Our framework offers actionable pathways for mitigating legacy impacts while enabling limited, low-impact hydropower expansion. Strategic restoration-development can guide biodiversity-inclusive energy transitions in major river basins worldwide, balancing climate mitigation benefits with freshwater ecosystem conservation.

The United Nations has committed to halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030, yet mining remains a major driver of biodiversity decline, particularly in conservation priority zones and areas with high species extinction risk. The accelerating clean energy transition intensifies this conflict, as demand for critical minerals essential for renewable technologies creates unprecedented pressures on biodiversity hotspots. Despite growing awareness, the full spatial extent of current and future mining threats to biodiversity remains inadequately quantified, limiting the effectiveness of global conservation strategies and sustainable development pathways.Here, we provide the first comprehensive, spatially explicit assessment of mining threats to biodiversity by compiling 145,000 km² of current mining footprints and analyzing their overlap with conservation priority zones (CPZs) and species extinction risks across 14 biomes globally. We find that 34% of current mining areas overlap with CPZs, threatening over 2,300 species, including many classified as critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable. These threats disproportionately affect fragile ecosystems such as Mangroves and Mediterranean biomes. Critically, our analysis reveals that minerals essential for the clean energy transition, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements, show the highest overlap with CPZs and areas of elevated extinction risk compared to fossil fuels, creating a direct conflict between climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation goals.Future projections demonstrate that without proactive spatial planning, an additional 43% (11.7 million km²) of areas potentially exploitable for metals, 29% (2.2 million km²) for non-metals, and 36% (387,000 km²) for coal overlap with CPZs, highlighting heightened risks from mining expansion. Our buffer analysis shows that inadequate spatial containment could escalate biodiversity threats by 4-54 times for CPZs and 7-562 times for extinction risks.We provide actionable solutions for navigating this nexus: spatial exclusion of mining from high-priority biodiversity areas, strengthened governance and community co-management, advanced restoration technologies, and circular economy strategies to reduce mineral demand. Our spatially explicit findings offer critical guidance for policymakers and industries to align mining practices with the Global Biodiversity Framework and Sustainable Development Goals, demonstrating pathways to reconcile resource extraction with biodiversity conservation in the clean energy era.

The clean energy transition is catalyzing an unprecedented surge in mineral extraction, frequently placing climate mitigation goals in direct conflict with biodiversity conservation. While ecological restoration is often cited as the primary mechanism to offset these impacts, it is rarely implemented effectively; globally, only a small fraction of mines undergo successful rehabilitation, with estimates in Australia as low as 4% for inactive sites. To effectively manage nature-related risks, we must move beyond the assumption of restoration and integrate quantitative estimates of recovery times into impact models. Without understanding the specific temporal costs required for ecosystems to return to reference conditions, we fail to account for the "added biodiversity loss" that accumulates over decades of recovery, which is crucial for biodiversity accounting in sustainable mining practices.Here, we present quantitative estimates of restoration times derived from a meta-analysis of 51 Australian studies. We utilized multilevel meta-regression models to assess recovery trajectories for species richness, diversity, and vegetation structure (measured as canopy cover), accounting for interactions with commodity types and management interventions.Our results reveal a distinct hierarchical recovery process. Flora richness takes approximately 13 years to reach reference levels, while vegetation structure restores after 17 years. However, faunal recovery is significantly slower, with richness requiring over 25 years and diversity estimated to take more than 40 years to match unmined systems. Broad taxonomic comparisons indicate that invertebrates recover faster than vertebrates, while sites utilizing complex active restoration techniques, combining topsoil, seeding, and planting, significantly outperform simpler methods.Crucially, these findings largely reflect outcomes from active restoration, which is expensive and rare in practice. Moreover, while structural metrics may recover in decades, the restoration of full ecosystem complexity and functioning often spans centuries. Therefore, current restoration practices alone are likely insufficient to offset the biodiversity footprint of mineral extraction. To reconcile mineral demand with global biodiversity targets, the industry must prioritize avoidance and adopt biodiversity-inclusive mining practices rather than relying solely on post-closure remediation.