The IEA’s Global Critical Minerals Outlook provides the most comprehensive annual benchmark of supply, demand, investment, and price dynamics for the minerals central to clean energy deployment. The 2025 edition documents widening gaps between the project pipelines currently in development and the volumes required under accelerated transition scenarios, with lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper all facing potential shortfalls. The geographic concentration of processing capacity in China — which accounts for the dominant share of refining for most transition-relevant minerals — emerges as the most persistent structural vulnerability, one that neither market incentives nor current policy frameworks have moved to resolve at the pace the transition timeline requires.