Land Use Planning: A Crucial Process in Ensuring Access to Mineral Resources—The Case of Portugal

To overcome the risks of outsourcing, the European Union needs to rely not entirely on external sources for the supply of mineral raw materials necessary for the sustainability of its industry. However, ensuring this supply is conditioned by the access to domestic mineral resources, and safeguarding them is a critical challenge that depends on land use planning policies. Based on Portuguese legislation and data obtained from a sample of the municipal land use planning tools currently in force, this paper examines how mineral resources are addressed during land use planning practice in Portugal. The analysis of the legislation reveals that minerals are addressed in the scope of the extraction activity, not as a natural wealth that deserves to be safeguarded and extracted when needed by society. Hence, the approach to minerals safeguarding is made by delimiting areas for the exploitation of geological resources in zoning maps and ensuring the compatibility of uses between agricultural and forest areas with mineral extraction activities. However, practice shows that this is not fulfilled in most Municipal Master Plans, which are the executive land use planning tools in Portugal, allowing to conclude that the current legislative framework and practice are quite unfavourable to the exploitation of minerals due to the restrictions imposed on access to land. This also has consequences for mineral exploration activities because duly informed mining companies will only make the necessary investments where the extraction of minerals can be carried out.