Breton – Millar – Photo © European Union 2024
(BRUSSELS) – The EU and Australia signed a Memorandum of Understanding Tuesday for a bilateral partnership to cooperate on sustainable critical and strategic minerals.
The partnership aims to support several common objectives, while based on mutual benefits. In particular, it seeks to enable the EU to diversify its supplies of materials necessary for the green and digital transitions, whilst contributing to the development of Australia’s domestic critical minerals sector.
The partnership covers the entire critical and strategic minerals value chain: exploration, extraction, processing, refining, recycling, and processing of extractive waste.
Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said the signing would “boost cooperation, investments, and businesses opportunities. We aim for more sustainable and responsible production and real industrial integration of value chains between the EU and Australia, supporting competitiveness. We now need to move forward swiftly and work together with governments and private sector to unlock the full investment and business potential.”
This MoU enhances cooperation between Australia and the EU in the following areas: i) integration of sustainable raw materials value chains; ii) cooperation on research and innovation along the raw materials value chains; and iii) cooperation to promote high environmental, social, and governance standards and practices.
Following the signature of the MoU, a roadmap with concrete actions will be jointly developed to put the Strategic Partnership into practice, over the next six months.
The EU has started building a series of partnerships on raw materials, following the Action Plan on Critical Raw Materials and the Critical Raw Materials Act. Such agreements were signed with Canada and Ukraine in 2021, with Kazakhstan and Namibia in 2022, with Argentina, Chile, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Greenland in 2023, and with Rwanda, Norway and Uzbekistan in 2024. The latest agreements with the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Chile contain a dedicated chapter on Energy and Raw Materials.
Negotiations for an EU-Australia free trade agreement are currently on-going.
