Critical resources, it's a hot topic at the moment, and most people relate critical resources to critical metals or critical minerals that are basically resources that are needed to announce the energy transition. There are a number of commodities that people generally hear about in the news that are critical.

They are so important because a lot of them are used to manufacture the technology that is needed to basically move away from fossil resource. So if we want to manufacture EVs, if we want to electrify the world, if we want to really develop a society that is non-carbon based, we need a lot of these metals.

The idea behind the centre? 

Obviously lots of people contributed, but from my personal perspective, it was all about talking to my teenage daughter and her friends and really noticing that that generation is quite disillusioned about the challenges that are upon, and especially what every single individual can do to address them.

So the centre is about creating something that can enthuse students and teenagers, to understand that there is something we can do about it. 

We need to be realistic. The situation is difficult under many aspects, but there are so many things we can do to at least address some of the more impending problems that are upon us.

Pretty much everything that we see in the world around us, that we build up our society and civilisation from, comes from the resources that we extract from the environment. 

There is no way that we can get away from that. So, we need to better understand how we can do that in a sustainable, friendly, environmentally and socially conscious way.

This centre is going to focus on training the future geoscientist for discovering some of these new critical meta resources all the way to characterising and processing them. 

So resources from a perspective of human resources to help facing the big challenges that are upon us.