Systemic risks and cascading dynamics in the global cobalt supply chain.

Area of Science:

• * Earth and Environmental Sciences
• * Economics
• * Systems Engineering

Background:

• * Critical minerals like cobalt are essential for the global transition to low-carbon technologies.
• * Interconnected supply chains are vulnerable to geopolitical tensions and disruptions.
• * Current risk assessments often isolate commodities, ignoring upstream-downstream dependencies.

Purpose of the Study:

• * To analyze systemic risks in global cobalt flows from 1998 to 2019.
• * To identify vulnerabilities and propagation pathways of disruptions in the cobalt supply chain.
• * To assess the resilience of nations to supply chain shocks.

Main Methods:

• * Integrated trade-linked material flow analysis with a multilayer shock propagation model.
• * Analyzed global cobalt flows across 230 countries and regions.
• * Modeled disruption propagation through horizontal-vertical and direct-indirect pathways.

Main Results:

• * Disruptions propagate via complex pathways, concentrating risk at mining but accumulating at refining-manufacturing.
• * Cascading failures create an 'avalanche network' four times denser than the physical supply chain.
• * Nations with low fragility but high exposure (e.g., Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico) are highly susceptible.

Conclusions:

• * Global systemic risks in cobalt supply chains show a volatile upward trend over two decades.
• * National mitigation strategies are insufficient; system-level coordination is crucial.
• * Achieving supply chain resilience requires stage-aware, multilateral cooperation.