At the 2026 Sustainable Global Leaders Conference held from October 20 to 22 at the Huangpu Expo Park in Shanghai, Bruno Oberle, Chairman of the World Resources Forum Association (WRFA), delivered a speech at the "Energy and Power Sub-forum: Sustainable Value Creation."
Drawing on his career experience in environmental governance and the mining sector, Oberle noted that the global sustainable transition is being implemented across many countries, and that the energy transition, as a historic industrial transformation, is tied to a series of deep challenges including key raw material supply, ecological impacts, and the reshaping of global value chains, requiring coordinated global solutions.
Oberle stated that the energy transition carries multiple layers of value: it concerns energy and supply chain security, helps the world reduce pollution and carbon emissions and tackle climate change, and can also spawn new industries and new jobs. This transition is not merely a swap of energy types but a reconstruction of the entire energy system, requiring systematic advancement in new energy development, energy storage facility construction, smart interconnected grid upgrades, and the electrification of industrial and transportation end-uses.
He highlighted that critical minerals such as copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium, and rare earths are the foundation of new energy and energy storage technologies, and that the energy transition will bring a substantial increase in raw material demand. According to research by the World Resources Forum Association, global natural resource use has tripled over the past four decades and is expected to double again over the next forty to fifty years, with demand growth for some critical minerals potentially reaching several times to a hundred times current levels.
The environmental costs of resource extraction and primary processing also cannot be ignored. Oberle noted that as much as 90% of global biodiversity degradation is directly linked to mineral extraction and primary smelting activities, and that 40% to 50% of PM2.5 pollutants, which have a significant impact on human health, originate from the first round of raw material production and refining. At the same time, mineral resources are unevenly distributed geographically, with extraction, smelting, and manufacturing located in different countries, forming a deeply interconnected global value chain.
Oberle said that China holds a leading position in the extraction and smelting of seven of the more than ten critical minerals related to the energy transition, and has outstanding advantages in industrial chains such as photovoltaics and electric vehicles. He also emphasized that current geopolitical tensions and the tendency of some economies to decouple value chains pose risks to the stability of resource supply chains.
In response, Bruno Oberle proposed three major directions. First, make every effort to raise raw material productivity. By comparison, labor productivity has increased about tenfold over the past fifty years and capital productivity about eightfold, while raw material productivity has nearly stagnated. This issue requires serious attention from policymakers and businesses alike, improving resource use efficiency through better management, enhanced compliance, and technological iteration. Second, decouple value creation from resource input, drawing on circular economy thinking to carry out systemic change and create higher value with fewer natural resource inputs. This depends not only on isolated technological improvements but also on joint planning by governments and industry, with reasonable management of society-wide energy and consumption demand. Third, improve international governance in the global resources field. There is currently an imbalance in the distribution of resource development benefits: pollution from resource extraction is mostly concentrated in resource-rich countries in the South, while technological dividends are often reaped by developed economies. The world needs to build a cooperation framework suited to natural resources and climate issues, streamline benefit-sharing mechanisms along the value chain, provide stable expectations for investors and mining entities, and balance the demands of multiple parties.
Bruno Oberle concluded that the core of the energy transition is the raw materials transition. The world must work together to increase the value output per unit of raw material and, under a clear, multi-stakeholder consensus governance framework, build a sustainable resource value chain to support the global green transition in a steady and enduring way.
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