The increased geopolitical and geo-economic importance of critical minerals requires a clear and accurate understanding of the nature of supply. Without this understanding, analysis of a range of key economic and policy questions will be based on systematically biased evidence and hence risks misinforming policy. This paper uses state-of-the-art techniques combining satellite imaging and artificial intelligence to detect mines and build a global mining database. A comparison of “new” and “old” techniques to record mines indicates a significant gap in the form of missing mines. ’Missing mines’ tend to be relatively small but can be found across a wide array of institutional settings and may be associated with multiple sources of misreporting. [...]
