As 2025 marches into its third month, the governance challenges that accompany rising demand for natural resources are not only on the front burner—they are proliferating—and  becoming entangled with the drivers of conflict and cooperation.

The heated competition for resources has bubbled up in a proposed billion-dollar deal for Ukrainian minerals now making global headlines. The view that critical minerals like lithium, manganese, and others could become bargaining chips in potential peace talks demonstrates how central they’ve become to global competition—and to the economic and political future of countries around the world.

The trendlines for the accelerating activity were clear as experts at the Environmental Peacebuilding Association’s The Year in Review and the Year Ahead roundtable in January surveyed how the long-standing nature of governance issues around natural resources are surfacing in today’s challenges.

The panelists agreed that coping with mounting natural resource challenges from the Amazon to Afghanistan will require governance mechanisms that not only manage resources sustainably but also reduce risks of conflict by being responsive to local environmental and social contexts.

Natural Resource Governance: Spotlight on Colombia and Afghanistan

Effective governance of natural resources allows for predictable, regulated patterns of use. It also creates structures and systems to mitigate and manage any harm done to the environment and communities created by their extraction and use.

While governance mechanisms can help navigate disputes surrounding resource extraction, tensions can be strained in their absence. Bram Ebus, a consultant on Crime, Conflict, and the Environment with International Crisis Group and the co-director of Amazon Underworld pointed out that in Colombia, “internal conflict dynamics for over half a century were intrinsically linked to land access and the presence of natural resources.”

The absence of state control of the Colombian Amazon after the dismantling of the FARC allowed illegal loggers and non-state actors to assert control over the region,” Ebus continued, making the Colombian Amazon a “weapon of war.” Not only could “non-state armed groups… decrease deforestation, as happened in 2022 and 2023, to please the government,” he added. “In 2024, we also saw that they could escalate deforestation to pressure the government” as COP16 was held in Calí that year.

An absence of state governance mechanisms in the Amazon Basin might also raise the stakes for those seeking minerals that will be important for the energy transition. “We know that non-state armed groups and state security forces are already occupying lands rich in these elements, minerals, and metalloids,” says Ebus, “and we very much anticipate more conflict in the future.”

A different resource governance challenge is emerging in Afghanistan. The Qosh Tepa Canal is being built by the Taliban to divert water from the Amu Darya to northern Afghanistan for its population and to rejuvenate farmland in the country, observed Erika Weinthal, the President of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association and Lee Hill Snowdon Professor of Environmental Policy at Duke University. But the project also will reduce the downstream flow of the river to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. In an already water-scarce region dealing with overuse from cotton cultivation and the impacts of climate change on glacier-fed rivers, the canal could have implications for “potential water conflicts,” said Weinthal.

International water treaties can help manage such tensions. But Weinthal noted that “we presume that [water treaties] are static, when often they can be disrupted either through new riparians tapping the water for their own domestic uses or through climate change.” In the case of the Amu Darya, neglecting Afghanistan in the current treaties governing the river has helped seed the ground for future disputes.

These two examples share a critical common element—the absence of effective governance. The gap leaves natural resources vulnerable to becoming points of contestation, heightening tensions over access, control, and use.

Critical Minerals, Critical Conditions: Competition, Communities, and Supply Chains

These challenges are also felt in other areas. Wilson Center Global Fellow Jojo Nem Singh noted that critical minerals have become part of “the high-tech competition between China and the US.” This growing competition—involving restricting access to resources—will shape “the scope, the pathway, and the pace of the global energy transition globally,” he said.

As global demand for these minerals rises, so does competition for access. New actors—including private companies, governments, or so-called ‘artisanal’ miners—are attempting to secure a slice of the expanding market. At the same time, however, communities near these mines bear the brunt of the impact on their land and their health.

Opposition to mining projects has led to conflicts between local communities and mining entities. Conflicts are even surfacing in countries like Bolivia, where mining exports are comparatively low to neighboring countries, said Weinthal. And new companies entering the critical mineral mining space may not abide by traditional governance mechanisms—such as prior consultation channels—that institute social and environmental safeguards, she added.

Critical mineral recycling offers an opportunity to alleviate dependence on the extraction of minerals and its resulting impacts. Yet the development of a secondary recycling supply chain faces significant hurdles, including the need for a major expansion of current mineral recycling infrastructure. But “when you prioritize recycling, you actually develop a market around it,” explained Nem Singh.

The future likely holds “a mixture of a primary and secondary supply chain,” but because the energy transition requires mining, “saying that one is better than the other is kind of missing the point of the energy transition dilemma,” said Nem Singh. Ensuring that the governance mechanisms around these resources are sound is important, he added, because “we cannot wish away mining if we want a clean energy transition.”

Looking Ahead: Lessons and Strategies for Future Flashpoints

Scaling solutions to resource challenges across different contexts is challenging, but there is reason for cautious optimism.

“We have lots of lessons that we can turn to from the environmental peacebuilding community,” said Weinthal. Environmental peacebuilding strategies such as public and private consultations, impact and benefit agreements with local communities, and transparency initiatives help provide avenues for engaging these contexts. When applied correctly, these steps are opportunities to transform points of contention into pathways for peace.

Doing so will be particularly important as mining operations expand. Some areas boast established regulatory frameworks and productive practices, but “there is going to be a pushback from communities, particularly in places where mining does not have political legitimacy as a development strategy,” warned Nem Singh.  In those contexts, he believes that “it’s really important to have a nuanced approach to understand why in some cases, for example, free, prior, and informed consent works and in other cases it doesn’t work.”

Environmental peacebuilding offers more than just strategies to manage the drivers of conflict. It also provides a valuable holistic alternative to traditional security frameworks. Ebus put forth a compelling example of what such an approach could look like in the Amazon, saying that it should include “an impulse for cross-border collaboration to rethink the security approach to the Amazon, not based on militaristic approaches, but based on what security means for the ecosystem and the Amazonian communities.”

This vision of security is at the core of environmental peacebuilding work. As a community, “we don’t just think about national security,” but also “about the linkages between the environment, human rights, and human security,” Weinthal emphasized. Rethinking security frameworks, centering local contexts, and good governance strategies are not just best practices—they are pathways for navigating future flashpoints.