The European Commission adopted an action plan at the beginning of December to step up its efforts to ensure the EU’s supply of critical raw materials. The overall idea is to accelerate relevant projects and reduce strategic dependencies. Details.
Essential materials
Critical raw materials are essential for sectors such as automotive, industrial engines, defence, aerospace and low-carbon and digital technologies (EnR, data centres, chips, etc.). But Europe has been very dependent on imports in this area and a supply crisis would be a real threat. In response to this, the Commission has developed a new action plan (RESourceEU) which will accelerate the implementation of the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) taken in 2024 to ensure security of supply for the EU (see box).
The CRMA’s main goals
Growing demand for strategic raw materials is fuelling a geopolitical race for access to resources. In April 2024, the Commission adopted the CRMA, following an Economy Security Strategy in 2023. This Regulation sets out action priorities and benchmark targets for national capacities to strengthen the EU’s strategic autonomy. In particular, by 2030, it must have the capacity to extract 10%, process 40% and recycle 25% of the strategic raw materials it consumes, and it must diversify its supply for each material so as not to depend on a single country for more than 65% of its demand.
Today, the Commission acknowledges that stronger and faster measures are needed “because market forces alone cannot guarantee the necessary diversification.” For example, in the case of permanent magnets, it has been estimated that it can cost up to three times more to produce in the EU than in other regions of the world.
One plan, several ambitions
The RESourceEU plan aims to fast track reaching the CRMA objectives, preserve and develop European production of primary and secondary critical raw materials, strengthen the EU’s resilience to supply disruptions, and pave the way for quicker diversification of supply chains. Although it applies to all critical raw materials, its immediate aim is to stimulate the value chains of rare-earth permanent magnets, raw materials for battery materials, and those related to defence. The planned measures aim to accelerate the deployment of projects that can become operational in 2029, or even earlier.
Strategic axes
The three key pillars of the RESourceEU plan are new funding and tools, streamlined procedures, and international partnerships. In particular, the Commission will set up a European centre for critical raw materials at the beginning of 2026. It is a platform that should facilitate the efforts companies make to aggregate demand, jointly purchase strategic raw materials, conclude purchase agreements and, in the long term, organise stockpiling.
The Commission will also introduce restrictions on the export of permanent magnet and aluminium scrap and waste from 2026. The action could extend to copper scrap.
Another main axis of RESourceEU is the Commission wanting to accelerate EU-relevant projects by mobilising financial risk reduction tools and removing regulatory bottlenecks, intending to help reduce dependencies by up to 50% by 2029. While 60 projects have already been approved within the framework of the CRMA (including 13 in third countries), a CRM financing hub will make it possible to coordinate all existing or ongoing support, whether it concerns institutions (EIB, EBRD), funds (InvestEU programme, Innovation Fund, Just Transition Fund) or sector initiatives (Battery Booster, European Defence Industry Programme). The EU is expected to mobilise up to 3 billion euros in the next twelve months to support tangible projects (e.g. molybdenum in Greenland, lithium in Germany, etc.).
Although emphasis is placed on extraction (mining activity) again, recovery is highly favoured, with circularity emerging as a central driver (cf. support for recycling projects and regulatory incentives aimed at recovering raw materials). Again, it is a matter of acceleration, as end-of-life product collection in the EU today only reaches 40% on average and less than 1% of rare earths are recycled. Further additional measures will be introduced in the future Circular Economy Act in 2026.
At the same time, the Commission will continue to support research and innovation to improve critical raw material extraction, processing and recycling technologies (see Horizon Europe, European Innovation Council, European Defence Fund, projects of common interest, etc.).
Finally, as another main strategic axis of the RESourceEU plan, the EU intends to deepen cooperation with partners who share the same values to diversify supply and accelerate industrial cooperation by building on the fifteen existing strategic partnerships signed with resource-rich countries, the latest being South Africa in November 2025 (the next could be Brazil). The Union is also working with Ukraine, the Western Balkans and its Mediterranean neighbours.
And what about the environment?
RESourceEU shows where the European Commission intends to mobilise all political and financial instruments with three objectives: to broaden the supplier base for critical raw materials, to reinforce extraction and recycling at national level, and to reduce current dependencies. It believes that diversifying critical raw material supply should become a top policy priority for the EU in the coming years.
However, this drive to bring Europe up to a level of autonomy compatible with its industrial and climate ambitions should not come at the expense of other EU environmental policies. The EEB(1) places emphasise on this, fearing that the revision of the WFD (Water Framework Directive), notably in connection with the easier issuance of new mining permits, may lead to a dilution of its ambitions. And this could also be the case for the REACH regulation or even, at another level, the CSRD and CSDDD regulations, which, for reference, were initially intended to build responsible and transparent supply chains.
1) The European Environmental Bureau (EEB) is the largest network of environmental citizens’ organisations in Europe. It has more than 190 member organisations in 41 countries and represents around 30 million individual members and supporters. https://eeb.org/fr/