At the June 15-17 G7 Summit in Évian-les-Bains, leaders agreed that no single country should supply more than 60 percent of their rare earth imports by 2030, established a new Critical Minerals Resilience and Production Alliance, and pledged harmonized traceability systems starting with lithium and nickel. The declaration arrived against a backdrop of geopolitical turbulence: a US-Iran peace deal signed on the summit's second day threatened to scramble the very supply dynamics the G7 was trying to reorder, while expert skepticism over the feasibility of the 2030 target ran as a persistent undercurrent through every corridor in Évian.
Introduction
The resort town of Évian-les-Bains sits on the southern shore of Lake Geneva, looking north toward Switzerland across water that turns the color of pewter in the late afternoon. It is a place accustomed to high-stakes gatherings. In 2003, it hosted the 29th G8 summit, a meeting dominated by the aftershocks of the Iraq invasion. Twenty-three years later, the town welcomed heads of state again, this time for the 52nd G7 summit, with a different kind of confrontation defining the agenda: not a shooting war between great powers, but a grinding, structural contest over who controls the materials that make modern economies run.
The summit had originally been scheduled to open on June 14, but was pushed back by a day to avoid a scheduling clash with a UFC mixed martial arts event held in honor of President Donald Trump's birthday, an adjustment that generated more commentary than it perhaps deserved. What did deserve sustained attention was what happened once the leaders finally gathered: on June 17, they adopted a critical minerals declaration that set a target of reducing dependence on any single non-G7 supplier for rare earths and permanent magnets to below 60 percent by 2030, with an ambition to reach 50 percent thereafter. They established a new alliance, announced 195 projects representing €64 billion in investment, and committed to harmonized traceability systems beginning with lithium and nickel.
The declaration did not name China. It did not need to. China produces 69.2 percent of the world's rare earths, refines more than 90 percent of them, and controls 93 percent of permanent magnet production globally. When G7 leaders expressed what their joint statement called "grave concerns regarding the use of non-market policies and practices and economic coercion, including arbitrary export restrictions," every government in the room knew exactly who they were describing. The question that lingered as leaders departed the lakeside was not whether the ambition was real, but whether it was achievable.
The Number That Defined the Summit
The 60 percent figure had a specific genealogy. It emerged from months of negotiation among G7 sherpa teams working under France's presidency, which had assumed the chairmanship on January 1, 2026, with critical minerals explicitly at the center of its agenda. Paris had framed the entire summit around a diagnosis: that profound imbalances in the global economy were fueling commercial tensions, encouraging protectionist responses, and eroding the shared growth the G7 was designed to protect. Critical minerals were the clearest single example of that imbalance, and the French hosts wanted a number concrete enough to hold governments accountable.
The declaration's language was carefully constructed. Leaders committed to reducing rare earth and permanent magnet dependence on any single supplier outside the G7 and partner countries to under 60 percent by 2030, "continuing to decrease further over time, with an ambition to reach 50 percent as soon as possible." For other critical minerals, ministers were tasked with setting specific targets before the end of the year. The architecture was deliberate: start with the most politically visible category, rare earths and the magnets derived from them, and let the framework expand outward.
David Klanecky, the chief executive of Cirba Solutions and a figure with more than three decades of experience in critical minerals markets, captured the logic of target-setting with characteristic directness. "It's definitely a bold target," he said of the 60 percent cap. "If you don't set a goal on a target for people to achieve, then nothing will happen." That sentiment was widely shared among industry figures who had spent years watching Western governments issue aspirational statements without binding metrics. The question was whether this target would prove more durable than its predecessors, or whether it would join the growing archive of ambitious declarations that outlasted neither the summit nor the news cycle that followed it.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, speaking to reporters in Évian, offered a formulation that was characteristically direct without being specific. "We agreed in various formats to work even more closely together on critical raw materials," he said. "We had very in-depth discussions with our guests about how we can diversify." The guest list at Évian included India, Brazil, Kenya, and South Korea, reflecting a recognition that de-risking mineral supply chains is fundamentally a plurilateral project, one that cannot be accomplished inside the G7 alone.
The Architecture of the New Alliance
Beneath the headline number, the summit produced a structural commitment that deserves more attention than the 60 percent figure typically crowded out: the establishment of a new Critical Minerals Resilience and Production Alliance. The alliance builds on the Critical Minerals Production Alliance created under Canada's G7 presidency in 2025 at the Kananaskis summit, itself a successor to a series of increasingly formal coordination efforts stretching back through the Minerals Security Partnership. The Évian declaration described the new body as "a non-binding G7 Critical Minerals Resilience and Production Alliance" that "provides a comprehensive platform for cooperation within the G7 and partner countries to strengthen the diversification and resilience of critical minerals value chains and streamline existing initiatives on critical raw materials."
The word "non-binding" carried weight. G7 countries have not agreed to a coordinated price floor mechanism, a failure that reflects genuine fiscal constraints and political disagreements about burden-sharing. The United Kingdom and Australia, both facing significant pressure on public finances, have been reluctant to commit public funds to support price stabilization measures that would benefit producers more than consumers in the short term. The central question of who bears the cost of diversification has not been resolved, and the alliance's non-binding character means that governments retain the discretion to opt out of specific initiatives as national interests shift.
What the alliance does establish is a coordination platform supported by the International Energy Agency, which will monitor critical minerals markets, issue early warnings of supply risks, and provide analysis to support G7 policy decisions. That is not a trivial mandate. The IEA's own research has documented the scale of the challenge with uncomfortable precision: even based on currently developing projects around the world, China's share of rare earth refining is expected to fall only from 91 percent to 77 percent by 2035. A decade from now, under the most optimistic scenarios consistent with current investment trajectories, China will still control more than three-quarters of global rare earth refining capacity. The gap between that projection and the G7's 60 percent ambition is not a rounding error. It is a structural chasm.
France, for its part, has been pushing for a permanent secretariat to steward the critical minerals agenda across G7 presidencies, preventing the institutional memory loss that has historically allowed momentum to dissipate between summit cycles. According to Reuters reporting, the secretariat could be housed at the IEA or the OECD, both based in Paris, an arrangement that would give France ongoing institutional influence over the agenda even after its presidency ends. That proposal had not been formally adopted by the time leaders departed Évian, but it remained on the table as a structural question that the new alliance would need to resolve.
Traceability, Stockpiling, and the Long Supply Chain
Two of the declaration's more technically specific commitments may prove more consequential over time than the headline supply cap. The first is the commitment to harmonized, interoperable traceability mechanisms, beginning with two pilot minerals, lithium and nickel, before extending to five new minerals each year with particular attention to rare earths. The second is a formal acknowledgment of stockpiling as an essential tool for supply security, with a commitment to exchange information on stockpiling systems, best practices, and procurement mechanisms through the IEA Critical Minerals Security Program and institutions such as Japan's JOGMEC.
The traceability commitment addresses a problem that has grown more urgent as export controls have proliferated. As I reported in my June analysis of Gibson Dunn's critical minerals legal review, the past two years have seen governments from Kinshasa to Beijing rewrite the rules of mineral ownership without touching the deed. Export bans, production quotas, and processing mandates have made the provenance of a processed mineral increasingly difficult to verify and legally complex to contest. A harmonized traceability system, if genuinely interoperable across G7 jurisdictions, would give governments and private buyers the forensic tools to enforce origin requirements, apply labor standards, and implement the new G7 Toolkit for Standards-Based Criteria to Identify Risks of Forced Labour in the Extraction of Critical Minerals, which was formally adopted alongside the declaration.
The stockpiling acknowledgment, meanwhile, lands in a policy environment that has been moving rapidly toward reserves-based thinking. Building on my earlier reporting on Project Vault and the SECURE Minerals Act, the G7's collective endorsement of stockpiling as a legitimate tool of supply security is significant even if it falls short of a coordinated mechanism. The declaration recognizes that developing industrial capacity for processing and recycling requires mobilizing both public and private capital, and calls on multilateral development banks, development finance institutions, and export credit agencies to coordinate support. That language is broadly consistent with the Council on Foreign Relations' June 2 recommendation that G7 governments establish a Strategic Resilience Reserve alongside Project Vault, rather than relying on a single warehouse to solve a structural problem that spans the entire value chain.
The 195 projects and €64 billion in investment cited in the declaration represent real momentum, even if the numbers require context. Figures for the cost of mineral investments needed for energy transition alone range from $590 billion to upwards of $2 trillion by 2040. Sixty-four billion euros, spread across a full year and multiple countries, is a meaningful signal of direction, but it is not a solution. The investment gap remains vast, and the projects announced since early 2026 are distributed unevenly across the value chain, with upstream mining attracting more capital than the processing and refining stages where China's dominance is most entrenched.
The Deal Signed at Versailles
While G7 leaders were finalizing their minerals declaration on the shores of Lake Geneva, a separate and more immediately dramatic event was unfolding in the gilded halls of the Palace of Versailles. On June 16, the second day of the summit, President Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a memorandum of understanding laying out terms for ending the conflict that had disrupted global commodity markets since February 28, when hostilities began. The deal established a 60-day ceasefire framework, with further negotiations expected to address Iran's nuclear program and other unresolved issues. Its most immediate economic consequence was the anticipated reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
The timing created a peculiar dynamic inside the summit itself. One G7 official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the critical minerals plan "was one issue the leaders could fully agree on at a meeting dominated by questions surrounding the peace deal between the US and Iran." Another official noted that "the members were all aligned on the need to diversify their suppliers of critical minerals so that they would be less vulnerable to interruptions," a statement that took on particular resonance given the commodity disruptions the Hormuz closure had already produced.
The scale of those disruptions had been severe. Roughly a quarter of the world's sulfur supply originates from crude oil refinery operations in the Middle East, and approximately half of the world's seaborne sulfur trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Since the conflict began, sulfur prices had nearly doubled, with local prices in some markets surging to $1,200 a ton and spot prices for sulfuric acid delivered to Chile doubling since February. In some regions, sulfuric acid prices had more than doubled. The Strait of Hormuz disruption had been described by IEA chief Fatih Birol as "the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market," and its effects cascaded directly into critical minerals processing.
Meena Chauhan, head of sulfur and sulfuric acid research at Argus Media, put it with unusual bluntness: "Now we're in uncharted territory really, because of how important the Middle East is." The significance for critical minerals is not abstract. Sulfuric acid is the foundational reagent for processing copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earths. Indonesia, the world's largest nickel producer, sources approximately 75 percent of its sulfur from the Middle East; several Indonesian nickel processors had already begun limiting output by April. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Goldman Sachs analysts estimated that supply-chain delays through June could curtail approximately 125,000 tons of copper output. Alon Olsha of Bloomberg Intelligence was direct about the arithmetic: "That matters for copper. In the African Copperbelt, sulfuric acid is essential for leaching, underpinning around 45 percent of DRC output or 6 percent of global supply."
China compounded the pressure in May by halting exports of sulfuric acid entirely, a restriction that Jack Lifton, co-chair of the Critical Minerals Institute, described as likely to have "tremendous impact on the non-Chinese chemical industry and metal processing industry." The convergence of Hormuz disruption and Chinese export controls represented precisely the kind of simultaneous supply shock that G7 governments had been warning about in the abstract for years, and that they were now living through in practice, even as they debated targets and alliance structures at a lakeside resort.
Iran as Opportunity: The Unexpected Wildcard
The US-Iran deal introduced a complication to the G7's minerals narrative that neither the declaration's architects nor the summit's press corps had fully anticipated. Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that while G7 leaders were discussing critical minerals coordination and strategies to de-risk supply chains, the peace agreement simultaneously opened the possibility of investment in Iran's previously inaccessible mineral wealth. Iran holds what is estimated to be approximately $27 trillion in mineral reserves, including 68 types of minerals and approximately 57 billion tons of proven reserves. Its copper holdings alone amount to approximately 2.6 billion metric tons of identified reserves, roughly 5 percent of global known reserves, making it one of the world's most significant copper resource holders.
The Sarcheshmeh Copper Complex, one of the world's largest open-pit copper mines, had been central to Iran's pre-sanctions ambitions. Following the easing of international sanctions in 2016, the Iranian government reportedly held discussions with Glencore and Rio Tinto, outlining plans to expand copper concentrate production to as much as 2 million metric tons annually by 2025. Those conversations went nowhere as sanctions tightened again, but the underlying resource base did not change. The CSIS analysis also noted that Iran holds a 15 percent stake in the Rössing Uranium Mine, acquired through a 1976 investment, which could become an active asset again as the peace framework enables Iran to regain access to frozen assets.
For the G7's minerals agenda, Iran's potential re-entry into global markets presents a paradox. On one hand, additional copper and mineral supply from a newly reopened producing country would help ease the tight conditions that the Hormuz disruption had created, and could, over time, contribute to the diversification that the 60 percent cap requires. On the other hand, Western investment in Iranian mining would take years to materialize, require navigation of complex sanctions architecture, and would ultimately add supply to a market where the primary objective is not simply abundance but strategic alignment. Whether Iranian minerals, processed through Iranian facilities, would count toward or against a G7 member's supply concentration calculations is a question the declaration does not begin to answer.
The Codelco chairman Maximo Pacheco, speaking from his perspective as the head of the world's largest state copper producer in Chile, where sulfuric acid prices had risen 44 percent in a single month during the crisis, was characteristically candid about the broader environment. "Nobody expected this to happen," he said of the war's cascading effects on mining. "Producing copper today is more and more difficult." Robert Friedland, the founder of Ivanhoe Mines, was more urgent: "The supply chain is breaking down."
The Gap Between Declaration and Delivery
In the days after the summit concluded, the reaction from expert observers was more measured than the declaration's ambitious language might have invited. CSIS analysts described the 60 percent target as "ambitious and will be challenging to achieve," a formulation that was technically diplomatic but practically pessimistic. The reason is structural rather than political. China controls 94 percent of sintered permanent magnet production and refines 70 percent or more of most strategic minerals. Alternative mines exist in Australia, Canada, and elsewhere, but processing capacity outside China is minimal and takes a decade or more to build. The IEA's own projections suggest that China's rare earth refining share will decline only from 91 percent to 77 percent by 2035, even under current development scenarios.
The experience of Japan illustrates the difficulty with uncomfortable clarity. Japan was hit with a Chinese rare earth export ban in 2010 following a maritime border dispute, a shock that triggered a national effort to diversify supply chains that has continued for fifteen years. Despite that sustained commitment, Japan still sources around 75 percent of its rare earth imports from China. CSIS analyst Schwartz noted the lesson with precision: it has taken Japan "over 15 years" to "make a significant dent in its dependence on Chinese rare earth materials," and she cautioned against excessive optimism about developments in the US and G7 space. Her specific concern was heavy rare earths, where she noted there "isn't really large-scale production of those heavy rare earths currently, and we will need to increase production of those materials specifically in order to have a rare earth magnet supply chain that is really cutting dependence on China."
The G7 declaration acknowledges much of this implicitly. Its investment language recognizes "the increasing need for stable investment frameworks and for market transparency and valuation for the security of supply," and notes that bridging the investment gap before 2030 will require mobilizing both public and private capital across equity investments, guarantees, and offtake agreements. Examples cited in reporting on the declaration's context include Washington-backed consortium Orion Critical Minerals entering Glencore's copper and cobalt assets in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Japan's expanded presence in Namibia's Lofdal rare earth project. Developers of the Longonjo rare earth project in Angola and the Songwe Hill project in Malawi are both reported to be aligning with Western supply chains by targeting the US market specifically. These are genuine and meaningful developments. They are also, in the context of the full reorientation required, illustrative of the distance remaining.
The harder institutional question that the declaration leaves open is governance continuity. France has been pushing for a permanent secretariat to steward the critical minerals agenda across future G7 presidencies, and the proposal to house it at the IEA or the OECD, both based in Paris, has a certain institutional logic. But the failure to formally adopt that secretariat before the summit closed means the new Critical Minerals Resilience and Production Alliance begins its life without a permanent administrative home, dependent on the goodwill and organizational capacity of whatever country holds the G7 presidency in any given year. The FORGE framework, which I examined in my June analysis of the global minerals governance landscape, faces a similar continuity challenge as South Korea's chairmanship expires and the alliance searches for a successor structure. These are not peripheral concerns. They go to the heart of whether the targets agreed in Évian represent durable policy commitments or annually renegotiated aspirations.
On the final morning of the summit, as the delegations prepared to disperse, a single anecdote from the official record caught the texture of the moment. The one issue, an unnamed official said, that the leaders could "fully agree on" at a meeting dominated by the US-Iran peace deal was the critical minerals plan. In a summit environment shaped by geopolitical turbulence, fiscal disagreements, and the gravitational pull of a Middle East peace framework being signed simultaneously at Versailles, the minerals declaration was the consensus achievement that everyone could stand behind. That consensus is genuine, and it matters. But standing behind a target of 60 percent, and building the mines, processing facilities, financing frameworks, and governance structures needed to reach it, are two very different things. The leaders of the world's largest democratic economies left Évian having accomplished the first. The second task, as Évian's placid lake surface reflected back nothing but sky, had barely begun.