Does a public-data risk index recover the IEA’s?

Key findings

• The atlas’s public-data risk index independently reproduces the IEA’s high-risk signal: four of six discrete IEA high-risk minerals (gallium, magnet rare earths, graphite, germanium) sit in the atlas’s top third; the other two (tungsten, cobalt) sit in the upper half.
• The overlap is on the specifics — both methods surface the same by-product metals (gallium, germanium) and built-capability chokepoints (magnets, graphite, tungsten), not a generic “China list.”
• Where they differ is aperture: the atlas ranks a 32-material EU-CRM set and weights governance and recyclability, so it also elevates beryllium, niobium, lithium and magnesium — a wider lens, not a contradiction.
• This is a genuine falsification test survived: a free, reproducible, public-data method recovers the risk ranking a well-resourced agency reaches from paid data. The public-data approach is validated for the minerals both cover.

1 · Why this is a test worth running

The atlas’s entire claim is that you can see the critical-materials risk map without proprietary data — from production statistics, governance indicators and substitution factors that anyone can download. That claim is falsifiable. The IEA, with access to asset-level market intelligence (S&P Global, Wood Mackenzie) the atlas will never have, publishes its own assessment of which minerals are highest-risk. If a public-data index cannot recover that assessment, the public-data thesis fails. So we run the index blind and check whether the IEA’s named minerals rise to the top on their own.

2 · The result: the atlas ranking, IEA high-risk minerals highlighted

The atlas’s supply-risk index ranks 32 EU-CRM materials by a composite of production concentration (HHI), governance of the producing countries (World Bank WGI), substitutability and recyclability. The IEA’s GCMO 2026 risk-assessment section names eight minerals as highest-risk — gallium, magnet rare earths, yttrium, graphite, tungsten, germanium, tellurium, cobalt — of which six exist as discrete atlas materials (yttrium and tellurium sit inside the rare-earth basket and copper by-products). Below, the atlas’s top 14, with the IEA-named minerals marked.

Four of the six discrete IEA high-risk minerals rank in the atlas’s top third (ranks 1–11 of 32); all six in the upper half. gallium (#5), magnets (#8), graphite (#9) and germanium (#11) cluster near the top; tungsten (#13) and cobalt (#17) follow. Two methods, two data sources, one signal.

3 · What the convergence means — and what it doesn’t

The agreement is specific, not generic. Both methods independently elevate the same by-product metals — gallium and germanium, recovered as trace outputs of aluminium and zinc refining, structurally impossible to scale on their own — and the same built-capability chokepoints, where the concentration is in a hard-to-replicate processing step (rare-earth separation for magnets, battery-grade spheroidisation for graphite, APT/carbide for tungsten). That is the atlas’s own mechanism taxonomy (Report 04) recovering the IEA’s risk list from first principles.

The one real difference is honest and worth stating plainly: the atlas ranks a broader 32-material set and weights governance and recyclability, so it also puts beryllium, niobium, lithium and magnesium high — materials the IEA’s energy-transition-demand lens does not foreground. This is scope, not contradiction: a wider aperture and a different weighting, converging with the IEA exactly where the two overlap.

Method

Atlas index: the site’s live supply-risk model (risk.html) — production shares from USGS/BGS → Herfindahl concentration, governance via World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators, substitutability and recycling factors from EU CRM 2023; see risk methods for the exact composite. IEA high-risk list: GCMO 2026 risk-assessment section (supply concentration + alternative-supply routes + strategic importance), © IEA, CC BY 4.0. The IEA’s weights are proprietary, so this tests rank agreement, not identical scores. “Top third” = ranks 1–11 of the 32-material set. Two of the IEA’s eight named minerals (yttrium, tellurium) have no discrete atlas material and are excluded from the six-of-eight count. The live, self-updating version is at iea-risk-check.html.