Raw Materials Week 2025: Europe’s raw materials debate has changed profoundly over the past decade.

Jan Moström (LKAB) opened this year’s Raw Materials Week in a panel, by reminding the audience of just how rapidly the landscape has shifted.
– Globalisation is gone. We now face a completely different world than we did five or six years ago, he said.

Raw Materials Week has gone from a one-day niche event to a geopolitical arena.

Sussie Gylesjö has attended Raw Materials Week for more than ten years, and seen the transformation. She is the internationalisation lead in Swedish Metals & Minerals and incoming President of the European Technology Platform on Sustainable Mineral Resources (ETP SMR).
– When I first came here, it wasn’t a week but a one-day high-level conference within the European Innovation Partnership for Raw Materials which also then included natural rubber and forest, she says. It was mainly the closest stakeholders in mining, geological surveys and a bit of downstream recycling. It was, in many ways, preaching to the choir.

Over time, that circle has widened.

Today, Raw Materials Week brings together upstreams and downstream industries, defence actors, NGOs, geopolitical analysts, and Commission officials in equal measure. The green and digital transitions pushed raw materials higher on the agenda. And geopolitical tensions, trade conflicts and other factors causing a supply risk further increased the urgency.
– That broader understanding simply wasn’t there ten years ago, Gylesjö says. People outside the raw materials community now recognise how exposed we are.

At this year’s Raw Materials Week one of the most recurring words was financing/funding and data. Europe’s exploration accounts for only 3% of the global total. A report commissioned by the EIB suggests that the EU would need to increase exploration efforts ten-fold to meet the extraction benchmark of the CRMA.
– Public geoscience data is key to facilitating exploration. And under the CRMA, every EU Member State must now develop National Exploration Programmes. Many presented their early approaches here on stage, revealing both ambition and uneven readiness, says Gylesjö.

What once felt fringe, such as exploration, geological data, risk financing, is becoming the centre of gravity.
– Raw Materials Week has become one of the key moments in the year to take the pulse of where Europe’s raw materials debate is heading, Gylesjö concludes.