Mineral raw materials are typically seen as essential components of all national economies, and complex decision-making processes define whether exploration or mining for minerals take place. Raw material supply security has been central for economic activity since early human civilization, and therefore discussed throughout history, even more so, since products have become more complex. The number of elements from the periodic table that are used to make some of our contemporary products has increased tremendously. For example, several hundreds of years ago, you could build a windmill with stone, wood, metal and textiles. Today we use hundreds of materials to make all the different parts, like rotor blades of carbon-fibre plastics, rare earth magnets, a multitude of cables, and sensors. These compositional changes allow, among other, for more efficient energy generation. This example illustrates that raw materials are important for many reasons. Raw materials can contribute towards technological and economic development that seeks to improve quality of life. Raw materials are also important for industries that are part of and feed into segments of the Global Value Chain. For instance, metal and alloy producers feed materials via component suppliers into the Global Value Chain for the wind turbine even if they are not direct suppliers. So, the links and impact of raw material access goes further: For instance to the suppliers which provide material inputs to suppliers in the Global Value Chain. Some elements have been in use for a long time and we therefore have a better understanding of how to find and trade them on an open market, such as for instance copper, zinc or gold. Other elements are not traded on an open exchange but mostly in direct business-to-business transactions, such as the rare earth elements. This makes accessing them more challenging. But how did we bridge the challenges of accessing particular elements and their criticality? Well, in the late 1930s, a discussion of critical materials emerged in the US when the issue of mineral raw material supply became related to the politics of national security. At that time, the U.S. government authorized stockpiling of materials for national defence to mitigate a potential supply risk. And with two oil crises in the 1970s, and relatively high commodity prices throughout the 70s and 80s, the political discussion about criticality was revived. Most recently, the US started to consider non-energy minerals as critical, defining a critical mineral as ‘one which is subject to supply risk’. And in response, the European Commission acknowledged that many of its member states had import dependences of high-tech metals. The European Commission launched a European Raw Material Initiative in which experts defined critical raw materials according to ‘their economic value and high supply risks’. The experts use a two-dimensional illustration of supply risk on the y-axis and vulnerability/economic importance on the x-axis to assess raw material criticality: SUPPLY RISK is defined as ‘the risk of a disruption in the EU supply of the material’. It's derived from examining the extent to which the supply of raw materials is concentrated in a particular country. This occurs jointly with examining the governance performance and trade aspects of this country. For example when determining EU import reliance, which is the extent to which the EU is dependent on imports of raw materials, both the global suppliers and the countries from which the raw materials are sourced are investigated. The supply risk parameter focuses on a global value chain segment where a high supply risk for the EU, is detected, this could be for example the extraction of raw materials. A focus on reducing, reusing, recycling and remanufacturing, as well as, to some degree, substitution, of the critical materials could contribute both to reducing the supply risk and to constructing a circular economy. ECONOMIC IMPORTANCE describes how important a materials is for the EU economy. This importance is measured in terms of end-use applications and the value added of the relevant EU manufacturing sectors to the EU economy. A correction of economic importance is conducted by examining the substitution index, which looks at the technical and cost performance of substitutes for individual appliances. Eurostat, the statistical database of the EU, can be used to derive this data. It's important to take into account at least three time periods for adjustment related to raw material criticality: the short-, medium- and the long term, and in all of these periods restrictions to a particular raw material could occur for a variety of different reasons. The EU criticality assessments have been conducted three times so far: in 2011, 2014, and 2017. And in the latest assessment, 61 candidate critical raw materials were examined of which 26 were assessed as critical. For example tungsten was assessed as of high economic importance but with a relatively low supply risk, while for both the light and heavy rare earths the economic importance was assessed as lower while supply risk was assessed as high, and magnesium was assessed BOTH as high in economic importance AND supply risk. The criticality assessment can provide insights from a global perspective on which countries have the largest supply share of a particular raw material. So it's one way of showing the producer concentration of a raw material on a global scale. So overall, the discussion about critical materials is seeking to address the strong dependence on raw material imports by industrialized countries, it is also seeking to create an understanding of a mineral’s criticality in order to support public and private decision-makers, in building resilience against a potential mineral’s supply restriction and, if needed, address potential impacts.