Geopolitical Mining 2025: Signals for 2026
A year-end strategic diagnosis of the global mining system – ten structural dimensions, ten signals, one lens for 2026.
Geopolitical Mining 2025: Signals for 2026 is a year-end strategic diagnosis of the global mining system. It is anchored in the work we developed in Mining Is Dead. Long Live Geopolitical Mining, which remains our starting point. The book set out how mining has moved from being “an industry” to becoming a strategic field of power, and the book’s Chapter 7 crystallised the lens we use here: mining as a geopolitical, institutional and symbolic system.
This 2025 diagnosis takes that lens and turns it into a practical map for the year ahead. It brings together the main tensions we have analysed over recent years and the evidence we have followed during 2025, and organises them into ten structural dimensions and ten strategic signals. It is both backward looking and forward looking: it consolidates what has become structurally clear at year end 2025, and sets out what is most worth watching as 2026 unfolds.
What this report offers
This first edition of Signals for 2026 brings three layers together in one place:
- Ten structural dimensions that describe how mining now sits inside a wider system of energy transition, industrial policy, defence, technology and legitimacy.
- Ten strategic signals for 2026 – concrete moves and patterns that show where that system is tightening, shifting or opening up.
- A closing note on direction of travel, outlining how the system could move and how to read that movement in practice.
The goal is not to predict prices or individual projects, but to offer a clear, shared lens for boards, investors and policymakers who need to make decisions under structural uncertainty.
I. The 2025 Diagnosis: Ten Dimensions of the Global Mining System
II. Strategic Signals for 2026: Tracking Geopolitical Mining
III. 2026 Direction of Travel: How to Read the Year Ahead
Who it is for
This report is written for:
- boards and executive teams in mining and metals,
- investors and analysts focused on critical minerals and the wider energy and industrial transition,
- policymakers and public institutions working on industrial policy, security of supply and the energy transition,
- journalists and editors covering mining, critical minerals and geopolitics,
- economists and researchers interested in mining as part of the global system.
It assumes a basic familiarity with mining, but it is not technical. The focus is on structure, signals and implications.
How to use it
Mining developments rarely arrive as one coherent story. They appear as events: a new policy, a project delay, a community conflict, an offtake agreement, a new refinery, a supply disruption, a price move. Signals for 2026 is designed to help connect those events back to the underlying system – why they matter, what they signal, and how they affect execution capacity across the value chain.
We invite you to use this document as a working tool: read it, annotate it, bring it into meetings and internal discussions. It can serve as:
- a framing note for board or investment committee discussions,
- a reference for internal strategy work,
- a shared map to align technical, financial and policy teams around the same language.
This 2025 edition is a starting point. As the balance between demand, execution, legitimacy and value-chain control continues to shift, we will keep updating this map and refining the signals each year. If there is one question that guides our reading of 2026, it is this:
“Can the system approve, finance and build the capacity it now needs – at the speed, in the locations, and in the value chain segments where it will actually be required?”
Download the report
The 2025 edition of Geopolitical Mining: Signals for 2026 is available as a complimentary PDF.
Download the PDF