Illegal mining for critical minerals needed for the global renewable energy transition is increasingly driving deforestation in Indigenous lands in the Amazon. In recent years, these illegal miners, who are often self-employed, mobile and working covertly, have expanded their gold mining operations to include cassiterite or “black gold”, a critical mineral essential for the renewable energy transition.
By Kristian Karlo Saguin, author of Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila's Resource FrontierCities around the world are learning to live with the challenges of increasing urban ecological precarity. In watery Manila, the metropolitan population of around 25 million is constantly expose