Criticality - What makes a raw material critical?

A key to the current debate on the supply security of mineral raw materials is the concept of 'criticality'. This presentation provides a brief review of the criticality concept, as well as the methodologies used in its assessment, including a critical evaluation of their validity. Furthermore, it discusses several risks present in global raw materials markets that are not captured by most criticality assessments. The key result is that current assessments of raw material criticality are fundamentally flawed in several ways. This is mostly due to a lack of adherence to risk theory, and highly limits their applicability. Many of the raw materials generally identified as critical may not be critical, meaning that new assessments are urgently required.

While these are important results for policy makers, it is not necessarily clear what their implications are for geoscientific research on critical element deposits, the topic of this session. Therefore, this question will briefly be explored in the second part of the presentation.