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Fairphone has warned the electronics industry that focusing solely on carbon emissions is masking a catastrophic biodiversity crisis.
The company’s inaugural “Nature Report” reveals that a staggering 75% of a smartphone’s total environmental impact occurs during the mining and manufacturing stages, long before the device ever reaches a retail shelf.
The report identifies 11 global mining hotspots, including regions in Brazil, Indonesia, and the Philippines, where the extraction of essential materials like gold, cobalt, and copper is putting severe pressure on local ecosystems.
Despite wildlife populations declining by nearly 70% over the last 50 years, Fairphone found that most tech firms are flying blind, relying on outdated biodiversity data that is often 10 to 20 years old to track their environmental footprint.
“The industry has been optimizing for carbon while ignoring the systems that actually keep the planet alive,” said Monique Lempers, Chief Impact Officer at Fairphone.
The assessment challenges the assumption that “low-carbon” technology is inherently harmless. Manufacturing processes for even the greenest gadgets continue to pollute the water and soil that support more than half of the global economy.
Fairphone’s research suggests that while companies race to meet net-zero targets, the destruction of ecosystems is happening largely out of sight and unmeasured. By publishing its methodology in full, Fairphone is calling on the wider tech industry to treat biodiversity loss as a core business risk.
The company argues that without a step-change in how impact is assessed, nature loss will remain invisible in corporate reporting, even as regulatory pressure for environmental honesty intensifies globally. Lempers concluded: “If we don’t understand where the damage is happening, we can’t begin to fix it.”
Global Mining hotspots
Fairphone has identified 11 global mining hotspots where biodiversity faces severe pressure from the materials essential to modern electronics, solar panels and EVs, including gold, tin, cobalt, nickel and copper.
The hotspots are:
- Brazil (Minas Gerais): Gold, Iron
- China (Ningxia): Magnesium
- Guinea (Bauxite Belt): Aluminium
- India (Karnataka): Iron
- Indonesia (Maluku, Sulawesi, Bangka Belitung Islands): Cobalt, Nickel, Tin
- Myanmar (Wa State): Tin
- Peru (Ancash, San Rafael): Copper, Tin
- Philippines (Palawan Island): Nickel
You can read the full report here.
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