Critical Minerals Risks

How concentrated a resource's global production is, weighted so that concentration sitting with higher-risk producers counts for more than concentration sitting with lower-risk producers. It is not a production figure, a price forecast, or a disruption probability.

It plots each resource's risk index against how many of nine national critical-minerals lists — the US, EU, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Canada and India — recognise it. A resource can score high on this tool's risk index while appearing on few government lists, or the reverse; the chart is built to surface that disagreement, not resolve it. China publishes no comparable list, so it's shown as its own "no list to check" viewpoint rather than assumed to give it a negative. Selecting a country re-views the chart "as" that country: its own production is treated as risk-free for that view, since a country doesn't face import-dependency risk from its own mines.

British Geological Survey production data is used under terms that restrict republishing it directly on a commercial site without separate permission. The trend chart shows direction and scale of change only, indexed to its first tracked year — never a BGS quantity. The five non-BGS resources (see below) don't carry that same restriction, but are shown indexed too, for consistency with every other resource in the picker.

The risk-weighting data (World Bank governance and environmental indicators, WorldRiskIndex, UNDP Human Development Reports) only exists from 1996 onward. British Geological Survey production shares themselves go back to 1971, but both charts are kept on the same 1996–2024 window so a given year lines up on both.

Both the production mix and the risk scores of producing countries change year to year. A jump usually means either a change in who's producing, or a change in a top producer's governance or environmental risk score — drag the year slider or click a chart to see the full producer breakdown for that year.

Governance risk, environmental risk, natural-hazard risk and human-development risk are genuinely different things, scored from different data. A country can score well on one and poorly on another. The tool deliberately doesn't collapse these into one number, and a "most elevated risks" panel ranks all of them for whatever resource and year you've selected.

One of the 48 risk lenses, but a different kind: it measures how many countries produce a resource and how evenly split between them, with every producer treated as identically risky: no governance, environmental, hazard or development weighting at all. It isolates the "too few producers, regardless of who they are" story from the risk stories the other lenses tell: a resource that scores high here but not under any other lens points to plain scarcity of alternative sources, not any one producer's instability. Use the "Direct mining risk only" filter to hide the broader contextual lenses (national development, sanitation, land use and similar) and see only the lenses most directly tied to production continuity.

BGS reports these as grouped categories (rare earth oxides/minerals; platinum-group metals) rather than split by individual element, so this tool treats them as single resources. A partial split for platinum-group metals (platinum, palladium, other) exists in the source data and may be added later.

No. It means production isn't concentrated in high-risk hands by this specific measure — it says nothing about labour conditions, water use, community impacts, or any risk this tool doesn't model.

For the great majority of resources (everything sourced from BGS) no: every producing region BGS records for the selected resource and year is included in both the trend line and the index, however small its share. The table below the chart lists all of them, not just the largest. Five resources (see the next question) work slightly differently: named countries are included the same way, but any production the source couldn't attribute to a specific country is shown as an "Other / unattributed producers" line, which is given a neutral risk score rather than any real country's.

All but five, plus one more that's BGS data used differently. Coking coal, synthetic graphite, silicon, lime and sulfur aren't BGS commodities at all — BGS carries no data for any of them — so they're sourced instead from the IEA, UN Comtrade/WITS trade statistics, and USGS respectively. These five are flagged "Not a BGS resource" with their own sourcing note when selected, cover different (usually shorter) year ranges than the BGS-sourced resources, and in two cases stand in for something not directly tracked: "Lime" is used as a disclosed proxy for elemental calcium, and "Synthetic graphite" measures export volumes rather than production directly. They're included so this tool stays aligned with the composition-weighted sibling tool at hoskinscircular.com, which uses the same five resources for materials whose supply chain runs through them. Hafnium is a sixth, different kind of exception: BGS does track its data, but for Zirconium — hafnium has no ore of its own and is always a trace co-product of zirconium minerals at a roughly constant ratio, so this tool reuses BGS's genuine Zirconium production shares as a disclosed proxy rather than inventing separate figures. It's flagged "Zirconium data used as proxy" when selected.

Yes, every selection (resource, risk lens, year, and the recognition-vs-risk chart's country view) is reflected in the page's web address as you use the tool, so you can copy it from the address bar to link or cite a specific scenario. Opening that address reproduces the same view exactly.