Critical Materials Atlas
Risk & scenarios · one index, your weights

There is no single supply-risk number. So choose the weights.

Every “critical materials risk ranking” is really one concentration index with someone else’s weighting baked in — on trade value or on tonnes, with or without governance, ignoring or crediting recycling. This page hands you the dial instead. Change the basis and the adjustments, and watch the ranking of 28 materials move. Where a material stays near the top under every setting, that is a robust dependency; where it swings, the “risk” was an artefact of the weighting.

Concentration basis
Adjustments — tap to toggle
Weight by governance Credit recycling Credit substitutes

What this replaces, and why one page is better

The atlas used to carry this as several separate rankings — a value index, a tonnes index, a governance-weighted index, a recycling-adjusted index — each one an argument about which weighting is “right.” They were all correct and all incomplete, because the honest finding is that the weighting is a choice, not a fact. Collapsing them into one dial makes that visible and testable: a robust dependency (gallium, rare-earth magnets, tungsten) sits near the top however you set it; a fragile one moves. For the external reality check — does any of this recover an independent expert list? — see the IEA cross-check. For the deeper “is concentration even measured right” question, the per-commodity status map. This index takes concentration as given and asks only: once you have it, what do you multiply it by?

Ingredients (each material’s three HHIs, its top producer’s governance score, its recycling rate and substitutability) are assembled by build_risk_index.py from the atlas’s own risk_index.json. Governance from World Bank WGI; recycling/substitutability from USGS. Adjustments are transparent multipliers, shown below, not a black box.