2040 Sustainable Battery Vision: Global Forum for Sustainable Batteries

The effort to electrify transportation includes minerals like lithium, nickel, graphite, and cobalt. These and other minerals are too often mined and processed in ways that contribute to harming communities and ecosystems. The minerals used to build batteries for the electric buses, cars, trucks, and trains that help curb the climate crisis could instead be produced as sustainably as possible around the world, with ample community buy-in at each stage of the process.

If advocates, industry, stakeholders, and policy makers work together, they can avoid replicating past problems and injustices and can instead work to build a sustainable supply chain, powered by just mining practices, and strengthened by innovations that make efficient use – and reuse – of existing mineral resources, all while protecting the communities that will be central to the clean energy future.

To support this vision, Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) and ClimateWorks Foundation founded the Global Forum for Sustainable Batteries, a worldwide network of nonprofit leaders, experts, and advocates committed to transportation electrification and mining justice. In 2024, the Forum developed a 2040 Sustainable Battery Vision to guide policymakers, organizations, companies, and the general public in the key elements of what a truly sustainable battery should be by 2040. The 2040 Sustainable Battery Vision covers all aspects of the supply chain and beyond.