Every conversation about the energy transition eventually arrives at critical minerals: copper for the grid, lithium and nickel for storage, cobalt for the batteries in between. Far fewer conversations arrive at the resource that makes all of it possible. Water is the input no substitution strategy can engineer around, and the one asset a mine cannot import.

The mining industry has spent a decade learning to talk about carbon. Water will be the harder conversation, because it is local, it is visible, and the people affected by it are standing right there.

New data from the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), released in July 2026, highlights the scale of the challenge. Nearly two-thirds (65.7%) of mining and metals facilities worldwide face significant physical water risks, underscoring that water scarcity and volatility are now industry-wide concerns rather than isolated local issues. The biggest pressure point is water stress, affecting 38.2% of sites, often alongside water depletion that signals long-term pressure on already stressed catchments and watersheds.

Facilities producing energy-transition materials sit disproportionately in regions of elevated water stress and unpredictable supply. At the same time, minerals nations are racing to extract are concentrated in some of the most water-constrained regions of the planet. ICMM’s conclusion: water is a critical constraint on the sector’s growth, and meeting it will take coordinated, system-level action rather than the fragmented, site-by-site responses that have characterised the industry so far.

A Social Question

In most companies, water sits with hydrogeology, environment and permitting. It is modelled, licensed, monitored and reported. All of that is necessary. That does not place enough emphasis on the need for water.

"It starts with water. In the regions where we work – Papua New Guinea, Chile, South Africa – water is the first thing communities raise, and that instinct is correct," explains GEI’s Jesse Morrill-Winter. "Jobs, land access and local procurement all sit downstream of a secure supply, for the operation as much as the community." 

"When a catchment is already stressed, every development plan is competing for the same volume, whether it's a mine, a resort or a town. Treating water as one stakeholder issue among many is how you end up with a project that is technically viable and practically unbuildable," he adds.

Communities living alongside mine operations are not debating water scarcity in the abstract. They experience it through water rationing, unreliable access to drinking water, declining boreholes, lower river flows and increasingly unpredictable rainfall. The result is growing pressure on companies to address water security not just within the site, but across shared watersheds.

That makes water the currency in which social licence is priced. A company can fund every clinic, scholarship and enterprise programme in its portfolio and still lose the room over a single unexplained change in water flow from a spring.

Conversely, an operator that shares its water data honestly, invests in supply that outlasts the mine, and treats the watershed rather than the lease boundary as the unit of analysis has bought itself something no communications strategy can manufacture.

The stakes rise again at closure.

"We've worked with Rio Tinto, Gold Fields, IGO, Nexa Resources and Fundo Vale who all pursue the same objective: an economy that is still standing when the mine is not," adds Palladium’s Meg Kauthen. "Agribusiness hubs, market gardens, land rehabilitation, agroforestry, aquaculture, processing – every credible post-mine industry is, at its root, a claim on water."

A closure plan without a clearly identified water source is not a plan. If future livelihoods require more water than the catchment can support, social investment risks creating stranded expectations rather than resilience.

Ecological and Engineering

GEI comes at the same resource from another direction, helping clients understand both the ecosystems that depend on water and the infrastructure that governs its movement.

"We were recently engaged by a public utility to help restore habitat for the boreal toad, a U.S. Forest Service Region 2 sensitive species listed as Endangered by the State of Colorado," says GEI’s Sarah Skigen-Caird. "The GEI team provided biological support to design a wetland restoration project upstream of a hydroelectric project in Colorado."

Successful breeding had been documented for years prior, although persistent drought exacerbated wetland decline, reducing available habitat for the toad.

"GEI in coordination with a restoration engineer were able to design a stream restoration plan that worked to protect facility infrastructure while at the same time raising groundwater elevations," she adds. "The restoration returned surface water to adjacent habitat."

The integration of habitat restoration while maintaining protection of critical infrastructure is at the heart of what GEI's team of ecologists, biologists, water quality specialists and engineers aim to accomplish. In this case, the species was the objective; the intervention was hydrological and engineered. Nobody saved a toad by writing a policy about toads.

At the other end is supply. The same skills are increasingly being directed towards getting more from existing systems. New reservoirs are difficult to permit and expensive to build, so attention is shifting to reoperating existing assets, rehabilitating ageing dams and improving conveyance and treatment infrastructure.

Water, once treated as a cheap input, is increasingly being priced as a scarce asset, with costs showing up in industrial siting, agricultural viability and municipal rates.

The same logic governs GEI's dam and hydropower work. Every operating decision is a negotiation between generation, downstream agriculture, community supply and the ecology that depends on the same flows. There is no version of sustainable infrastructure that treats water as a fixed input on a spreadsheet. It has to be designed for what it is: dynamic, contested, seasonal and increasingly unreliable.

Three Lenses

"Thus, we look at water three ways – as the basis of community livelihoods and regional economies, as the determinant of whether an ecosystem survives, and as an engineering variable to be modelled and managed," says Kauthen.

For most mining companies, those three views sit with three different functions, are commissioned from three different consultants, report through three different lines, and are reconciled in the year the licence comes up for renewal.

That fragmentation is precisely what ICMM is calling time on. Integrated water stewardship is not a reporting framework. It is the practical decision to plan communities, ecosystems and operations against a single water picture across the full life of the asset and beyond it.

In practice, integrated water stewardship means planning around the catchment rather than the mine lease, aligning community, ecological and operational needs around a shared understanding of future water availability. It requires common data, cross-functional decision-making and collaboration with governments, neighbouring industries and other water users on long-term solutions.

The Through-Line

Whether the conversation is with a community in the Northern Cape of South Africa watching a borehole run dry, or with a biologist in the Colorado high country trying to keep water in a wetland long enough for a toad to breed, the underlying truth does not change.

Water is where the social, environmental and economic systems we care about intersect.

ICMM's data confirms what practitioners already know: water is not a marginal environmental issue for mining. It is a structural constraint on the industry's future and on the energy transition that depends on it.

Protecting it is the precondition for everything else the sector hopes to build.