Critical minerals are essential to the global energy transition, digitalization, and industrial development. But the race to secure minerals such as cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, and nickel also risks deepening long-standing gender inequalities in the mining sector. 

This IGF report, developed in partnership with the ILO and the UNDP, examines how the expansion of critical mineral extraction can affect women’s rights, particularly for Indigenous women, rural women, and women living in mining-affected communities. It looks at how environmental impacts, the location of mineral reserves, and accelerated permitting processes can increase risks related to land, livelihoods, food security, health, unpaid care work, safety, employment, consultation, and benefit sharing. 

The report also identifies practical actions for governments and mining companies to make critical minerals governance more gender-responsive. These include integrating intersectional gender analysis into impact assessments, ensuring inclusive consultation and women’s meaningful participation, respecting free, prior, and informed consent, and establishing benefit-sharing mechanisms that expand women’s access to decent work, compensation, community development, and economic opportunities. 

By placing gender equality at the centre of critical minerals governance, the publication argues that the transition to a low-carbon and digital future can become an opportunity to advance women’s rights, strengthen accountability, and support more inclusive and sustainable mineral development with gender-responsive policies in place.

Indonesia has the world’s largest nickel reserves, with an estimated 55 million tonnes. It has been the world’s leading producer of nickel over the past few years, with a global production share of 16% in 2017 rising to 54% in 2023, when it produced 2.02 million tonnes of nickel. 

The conclusions and lessons learned from this case study can be used to guide more sustainable nickel laterite mining and processing in Indonesia as well as other jurisdictions.

Governments in developing countries and regions are adopting VSSs in export promotion measures to ensure exported products meet sustainability-related market requirements, while also expanding trading opportunities for producers, women, and micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises.

This report examines how integrating VSSs into national regulatory and sectoral systems can drive export-promotion outcomes. It provides insights into how governments are developing measures to support the use of VSSs in key sectors to increase access to markets and to help producers adopt and maintain more sustainable production practices. The report presents examples from four countries that have integrated or supported the use of VSSs for export promotion, highlighting lessons learned, benefits for producers, key successes and challenges, and emerging best practices.  

These four cases demonstrate that despite challenges, a structured, well-supported collaboration among governments, industry, and VSS organizations can drive both market access and more sustainable production practices. This report concludes with actionable recommendations for policy-makers to effectively address emerging challenges and risks linked to the use of VSSs in export-promotion measures and the broader implications of evolving sustainability-related policies in importing countries. 

Greenwashing has become a growing policy concern as businesses increasingly market products, services, and practices using environmental claims. Misleading or unsubstantiated claims can weaken consumer trust, distort competition, and undermine genuine sustainability efforts. In response, governments around the world are introducing new rules to improve the reliability of environmental information in the marketplace. 

This report provides a comparative overview of regulatory responses to greenwashing in Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, the European Union, France, India, Kenya, Peru, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It reviews how countries are using different policy tools, including consumer protection and competition law, sector-specific legislation, advertising standards, and upcoming specific greenwashing proposals. 

The mapping reveals significant progress. Most jurisdictions now embed core principles—truthfulness, clarity, substantiation, and transparency—into their regulatory frameworks. At the same time, persistent gaps remain. Pathways to credible evidence are often underspecified, leaving companies uncertain about what counts as adequate substantiation. Data collection along complex value chains remains a major implementation challenge, particularly for smallholders and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). And while many regulations recognize third-party certifications and VSSs as admissible evidence, few clearly define the criteria that make such schemes credible. 

The report argues that effective greenwashing regulation must balance credibility with inclusiveness. It offers recommendations across three areas: 

• strengthen the design of substantiation requirements and adopt proportionate approaches to reflect differences in company size, sector, and position in the value chain,
• enable implementation by investing in data infrastructure and producer support, combining enforcement with guidance and consumer awareness, and promoting cooperation and experience sharing, and
• support compliance by clarifying the role of VSSs through recognition criteria rather than endorsements of specific schemes. 

Together, these recommendations point toward regulatory responses that empower consumers, support producers, and promote credible sustainability markets globally.

The Bogotá River is essential to central Colombia, providing drinking water for nearly 6 million people across 46 municipalities and supporting agriculture and industry across Cundinamarca. Rapid urban growth, untreated wastewater, and the loss of wetlands degraded water quality and increased flood risks. Extreme events, such as the 2010–2011 floods, highlighted the limits of traditional flood protection approaches. 

To address these challenges, the World Bank and the Corporación Autónoma Regional de Cundinamarca funded a major restoration project combining conventional infrastructure, such as wastewater treatment and hydraulic works, with NBI interventions, including wetland restoration and river rehabilitation. 

These interventions improved water quality, restored natural flood buffers, and increased the river's capacity to manage high flows. The project closed in December 2022. 

The NBI Global Resource Centre conducted a SAVi assessment to examine the long-term performance of these investments over a 50-year period at the basin scale. 

Results show that hybrid infrastructure delivers strong economic returns when the full range of benefits is considered. The project generates USD 1.27 in benefits for every USD 1 invested, with total net benefits of USD 349 million. Avoided flood damage represents a major share of this value, with an estimated USD 828 million in avoided losses to homes and businesses. 

In addition to financial returns, the project strengthened climate resilience and improved environmental quality and living conditions for millions of people. The findings highlight the role of hybrid infrastructure as a cost-effective strategy for river basin management, delivering integrated economic, social, and environmental benefits.

The climate and biodiversity crises are closely interconnected, yet national policies often address them separately, leading to fragmented approaches. This policy analysis highlights the need for stronger integration and defines synergies as the intentional coordination of planning and implementation across NDCs, NAPs, and NBSAPs to achieve more effective outcomes and co-benefits. 

Focusing on Mongolia, the report begins by outlining the institutional landscape for climate and biodiversity, along with the current status of key national policies. This is followed by a synergies assessment, which examines how Mongolia’s NDC, NAP, and NBSAP intersect, highlighting shared objectives, targets, indicators, activities, stakeholders, sectors, potential trade-offs, and gaps. It then explores the potential challenges, gaps, and barriers that could hinder deeper integration and the development of effective synergies. The final section highlights actionable opportunities and strategic entry points to enhance alignment and strengthen coordination across Mongolia’s climate and biodiversity frameworks. 

The analysis was guided by the Effectively Delivering on Climate and Nature: NDCs, NAPs and NBSAPs Synergies checklist. It aims to inform national focal points; NDC, NAP, and NBSAP policy-makers and planners; and civil society organizations in Mongolia working to align their climate and biodiversity policies and actions to seek more effective outcomes and multiple and co-benefits.

For decades, tax incentives have been a central feature of investment promotion strategies across the developing world. National investment laws have become the favoured vehicle for granting these incentives, particularly in least developed countries, where they form the primary legal basis for tax incentives in more than half of all cases. 

Despite their prevalence, little attention has been paid to how these incentives are governed: Who decides their design? Who grants them, and on what basis? How do they interact with other instruments granting tax incentives? Who monitors whether they achieve their stated objectives? And what institutional arrangements exist to ensure accountability when they do not? 

This report sets out to answer those questions. Drawing on a survey of 105 investment laws from Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, complemented by interviews with government officials, the report maps the current landscape of tax incentives in investment laws across emerging markets and developing economies: their prevalence, their design, their interaction with other legal instruments, and the governance structure that surrounds them. 

By examining how tax incentives are embedded in investment laws and the governance challenges that arise, the report aims to foster a more coordinated approach between institutions that promote investment and those that safeguard public revenue. Ultimately, it seeks to support a shared understanding of the role that tax incentives should play in attracting sustainable investment, building a common vision that promotes quality investment while contributing fully to domestic resource mobilization.

Marmato, in the department of Caldas, is one of Colombia's most historically significant gold-mining territories, where artisanal and small-scale gold mining has shaped local livelihoods and cultural identity for centuries. But mining in Marmato also carries serious risks. Steep hillsides, unmanaged waste, water contamination, and the near-absence of structured closure planning have left the territory exposed to landslides, ecosystem degradation, and long-term environmental liabilities. 

Colombia's regulatory framework for artisanal and small-scale mine closure is still emerging. Most mining areas in Marmato currently lack approved closure plans, meaning environmental risks accumulate without a clear pathway for remediation. The NBI Global Resource Centre applied the SAVi methodology to evaluate three closure pathways: a baseline scenario in which mines are abandoned without intervention; a comprehensive closure plan implemented at the end of mine life; and a progressive closure plan in which stabilization, rehabilitation, and NBI measures are implemented gradually during operations. The quantitative analysis is based on a pilot assessment of a representative artisanal mine, with results intended as indicative rather than definitive. 

The results show that mine closure in Marmato is fundamentally a risk-reduction investment. Avoided mortality risk—linked to reduced exposure to landslides, rockfalls, and tunnel collapse—represents the largest share of monetized benefits. The progressive closure plan outperforms end-of-life closure: for every USD 1 invested, the region gains USD 1.44 in return—a conservative estimate, as several social and health benefits could not be monetized due to data limitations. Earlier implementation reduces costs by making use of materials generated during operations rather than purchasing external inputs at the end of mine life, and allows risk reduction and ecosystem service benefits to accrue sooner. 

NBI plays a central role in this performance. Reforestation, slope stabilization, soil remediation, and hydrological restoration contribute ecosystem services, including erosion control, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity recovery, and reinforce the long-term effectiveness of closure outcomes.

The global automotive industry is undergoing a structural shift driven by transport electrification and increasing EV adoption. Valued at nearly USD 240 billion, contributing about 7.1% of GDP and supporting over 30 million direct and indirect jobs, India's automotive sector holds the potential to create local manufacturing opportunities through the EV transition. 

EV manufacturing requires an industrial configuration that is capital-intensive, electronics- and battery chemistry-driven, and significantly more exposed to global supply chains than conventional automotive manufacturing. Net localization for several high-cost EV components─such as batteries, motors, DC-DC convertors, and on-board chargers─is increasing but remains low in India despite several central government and state government policies. 

This report examines the subnational policy landscape for EV and battery manufacturing across leading automotive states in India. It finds that at least 14 state governments provide financial support through capital expenditure- or operating expenditure-reducing measures for localizing EV and battery manufacturing, indicating a growing ambition among Indian states to attract investments in the sector. However, targeted policy instruments that address specific cost barriers shall be needed for deepening localization. State policies remain less differentiated for midstream (such as production of cathode active materials, precursor materials) and upstream (critical minerals mining or sourcing) segments of the value chain, demonstrating growing policy maturity for downstream segments such as vehicle/battery assembly but nascency in terms of an emerging integrated value chain strategy. 

The study suggests six actions for central and state governments: 

• design subnational support measures that de-risk midstream and upstream battery investments,
• provide dedicated policy support for research and development investments, patent filing, and strategic intellectual property creation in the battery value chain,
• conduct fresh rounds for Production Linked Incentive Auto to increase industry participation as downstream manufacturing for EV original equipment manufacturers and component suppliers matures,
• develop project preparation facilities and plug-and-play industrial land infrastructure at the state level to further accelerate cell and battery manufacturing,
• bridge the skill gap by establishing a dedicated skilled workforce development program for EV and battery manufacturing, and
• introduce clear public procurement and phased zero-emission vehicle mandates to boost demand and reduce market risk for domestic manufacturers.

Copper is central to Zambia’s economy. The country is the world’s 10th-largest copper producer, and copper accounted for around 60% of export revenues in 2023. Yet, the country’s heavy reliance on mining exposes it to risks, including slower growth, limited diversification, weak job creation, and heightened vulnerability to external shocks. 

Against this backdrop, deeper participation in the copper value chain—through processing and manufacturing—offers a potential pathway to strengthen resilience and domestic linkages. Still, value addition is not automatic. Its benefits depend on careful sequencing, competitiveness, and the ability to address binding constraints while proactively managing social and environmental costs. 

With global demand for copper expected to remain strong, and projections pointing to persistent supply shortfalls into the mid-2030s, Zambia is therefore well placed to expand its role in copper value chains.