Methodological advances in UK criticality assessment

Critical minerals (CMs) underpin the UK’s economy, technology, energy transition and industrial resilience. As global markets become more volatile and supply chains more complex, the UK must continually refine how it identifies and manages material supply risk. This report evaluates a series of methodological enhancements designed to better tailor future UK Critically Assessments (UK CA) (Mudd et al., 2024) to the structure of the UK economy, its trade profile and strategic industrial sectors. This report explores methodological advances in seven key areas:
- Market sentiment
- Economic importance
- Trade restrictions
- Material flow characterisation
- Environmental, social, and governance standards
- Corporate concentration
- Future mineral production
These updates provide a more UK-specific analysis, with stronger representation of the manufacturing sector and more accurate integration of material use across the UK’s predominantly service-based economy. For import-reliant nations, like the UK. with limited upstream production, accurate tracking of intermediate and manufactured product flows is essential to understanding true supply dependencies and points of intervention. A key development is the explicit mapping of interconnections between industrial sectors, identification of provider–consumer relationships and more robust quantification of supply chain vulnerabilities, including cascading impacts and competition for constrained resources. Incorporating market sentiment and trade interventions indicators introduce a new geopolitical and financial dimension to supply risk assessment.
Together, these enhancements deliver a more comprehensive and policy-relevant understanding of criticality, particularly by improving visibility of mid-stream supply chain risks. While the new indicators reduce the relative weighting of those used in the 2024 UK CA, their impact will be rigorously tested through sensitivity analysis in the next assessment cycle, including retrospective evaluation against 2024 results.
In line with previous recommendations, the next UK Criticality Assessment should be delivered in 2027/28.