Fast-tracking US critical minerals projects under President Trump’s March 2025 executive order has seen some mining permits issued in as little as 20 days, prompting Oxfam America to warn that compressed timelines without robust environmental review and community consultation could trigger force majeure events, legal challenges and multimillion-dollar delays. Oxfam policy leads Emily Greenspan and Andrew Bogrand argue that IFC performance standards should be treated as a minimum and that US-backed export credit and development finance should be tied to IRMA’s more stringent audit regime. They also caution that the industry-led Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative could dilute existing benchmarks and that policymakers still underestimate the globalised nature of refining and processing, particularly in regions such as Africa’s Copperbelt.

Mandatory biodiversity net gain (BNG) for nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIPs) has been pushed back to November 2026, a six‑month delay from the original May 2026 start. The deferral affects DCO‑consented schemes such as major highways, rail corridors and large energy projects, which will ultimately need to evidence at least 10% biodiversity uplift using habitat units and metric‑based baselines. Designers and environmental consultants gain extra time to refine baseline surveys, habitat creation plans and long‑term management obligations before BNG becomes a legal requirement.

Ørsted has lost a UK Supreme Court case over whether it could claim tax relief on geotechnical and environmental surveys for offshore wind farms that never progressed to construction. The ruling confirms that expenditure on early-stage site investigation and feasibility work for prospective projects does not qualify as “research and development” for UK tax purposes when no tangible asset is created. Developers may now need to reprice front-end survey campaigns and reconsider how they structure pre-consent ground investigation and design studies.