THERE are few industries that are at once both so essential to modern life and yet potentially so destructive of it as mining. The extractive industries underlie and make possible almost every aspect of the world in which we live.

The devices that we use, the cars that we drive, even the energy sources that increasingly power us — all these and so much else in our day-to-day lives rely on a constant source of minerals, critical minerals, to be precise, which must be dug, drilled, bored, or quarried out of the earth in immense quantities.

These minerals are, of course, critical in another sense, too; for the extraction of them in such volume also has the potential to endanger, critically, the world around us. The mining of these minerals at such a rate risks permanently disfiguring landscapes and polluting watercourses. It risks displacing whole communities and running roughshod over delicately balanced ecosystems. It risks generating new regional conflicts and fuelling those already in existence.

And our need of these minerals shows no sign of diminishing. On the contrary, alongside the part that they play in enabling so much of the technology on which modern life already depends, critical minerals are also essential if we are to move towards a greener, decarbonised economy. As the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, recently put it, “A world powered by renewables is a world hungry for critical minerals.”

IT IS for this reason — this dual sense in which these minerals are critical — that the Roman Catholic Church’s recent call for disinvestment from extractive industries is both right and wrong; for, notwithstanding its laudable highlighting of the desperate ways in which the poorest are most affected by mining, the Vatican’s central policy of “divestment as an ethical and effective strategy” risks under-appreciating both the necessity of mining to modern life and the complexity of the global finance that underpins it.

This is because, put bluntly, the problem with any industry as essential to the world economy as mining is that it will continue to develop, regardless of whether you invest in it or not; to withdraw your investments from it, then, is simply to give up your seat at the table to someone else.

What is more, mining is not like arms, or pornography, or gambling. Unlike these industries, mining is essential to modern life, and will continue to be all the more so if we are to have any hope of a decarbonised future. Simply washing one’s hands of it, then, both fails to appreciate its necessity while diminishing the Church’s potential to advocate for justice from within it.

This is why the Church of England Pensions Board has begun to outline a new approach. By means of the Church’s unique position as both a shareholder in the extractives industry and also a stakeholder in the communities most affected by mining, the Board has established a new, sector-wide initiative, the Global Investor Commission on Mining 2030, which has set out an ambitious ten-year vision for driving a responsible mining sector (News, 7 November 2025).

With more than $19 trillion in assets under management, the Commission brings together governments, industries, community leaders, and investors to advocate for a just and sustainable mining sector. Since its inception in 2023, the Commission has already established a global safety standard for tailings dams (the dams used to store the by-products from mining operations), which has now been implemented by the majority of public mining companies; and the Commission has just launched the Global Centre for Peacebuilding and Business, which empowers local churches to advocate for peace in communities disrupted by extractive operations (News, 13 February).

THE great strength of these initiatives is that they are premised on the idea that the connections that already exist within the tangled web of the extractives industry can be used for good. They recognise the connections between global finance and extractive operations; they recognise the connections between the iPhone in your pocket and real people mining cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; they recognise the connections that exist by virtue of the Church global, such as that between my own in Edinburgh and the diocese of Nampula, in northern Mozambique.

There is more work to be done here, of course, and both the Commission and the Global Centre are still in their infancies; but the point at stake is that, if the Church wants to advocate for a just and equitable mining sector, and if it wants to stand alongside those communities most affected by mining and extraction, then it cannot simply walk away.

Peacebuilding can be messy, and mining even more so; but the Church must engage in both if it is to have any hope of bringing about a fairer, cleaner, and more equitable world in the decades to come.

The Revd Dr David Bagnall is the Rector of St John’s, Edinburgh, and a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Global Centre for Peacebuilding and Business.