7 minute read
The Atacama: At the centre of climate injustice
RAMÓN MORALES BALCÁZAR
Ramón Morales Balcázar is the founder of the local NGO Tantí Foundation (Seed, in the Kunza language) in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, and a member of the Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salt Flats. He is also an active member of Red por los Ríos Libres (Free-Flowing Rivers Network) and SCAC (Civil Society for Climate Action). He is a PhD student in Rural Development at the Metropolitan Autonomous University UAM-Xochimilco in Mexico. His thesis project is aimed at understanding the territorial impacts resulting from eco-extractivism in the context of global crisis. Translated by Andy Symington.
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The community of San Pedro de Atacama, in the north of the country and origin of about 25% of the world’s lithium, fulfils four of these: arid or semi-arid areas; prone to natural disasters; areas liable to mountainous ecosystems. At the foot of the Andes, the community has a population of nearly 11,000, of whom more than half identify as indigenous. The Atacameño or Lickanantay people are a First Nation of agropastoral tradition; though they descend from the first human settlements in the region, they were only recognised by the state of Chile in 1993.
The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has identified that indigenous peoples are ‘among the first to face the direct consequences of climate change, due to their dependence upon, and close relationship, with the environment and its resources. Climate change exacerbates the difficulties already faced by indigenous communities including political and economic marginalization, loss of land and resources, human rights violations, discrimination and unemployment' (2). According to the country’s national human rights institute INDH, Chile currently has at least 117 socio-environmental conflicts, a third of which are in indigenous territory. In San Pedro de Atacama, indigenous communities and inhabitants of the Salar de Atacama basin face drought and desertification; and areas with the effects of climate change in conditions of vulnerability exacerbated by the absence of the state and the socio-environmental impacts of expanding mining operations.
Climate change is being felt with ever-greater intensity across the sizeable Atacama Desert, where high temperatures and extreme aridity combine, paradoxically, with violent summer rains to cause deaths, flooding and water-logging, erosion, washing-away of mining waste and huge economic losses. These torrential rains descend from the Andes destroying vegetation, vehicles, homes and infrastructure, leaving people isolated and without basic services for weeks and even months. They force the closure of tourist sites administered by local indigenous communities and destroy the irrigation canals and vegetable gardens that give life to the oasis towns and mountain villages here (3). Events caused by climate change thus leave thousands of people out of work while the decrease in cultivable soil, drinkable water and wild vegetation – the basics needed for agriculture and livestock – means the gradual loss of food sovereignty which has already been weakened by drought and monopolization of land by the tourism and mining industries.
These events were catastrophic in San Pedro and other northern Chilean locales in 2012 (4), 2015 (5), 2017 (6) and 2019 (7) and the late and insufficient response from the government, both in dealing with the flooding and in working to prevent future disasters, demonstrates a lack of concern for the lives of communities who find themselves exposed to increasingly difficult and unjust living conditions. The Chilean Observatory of Climate Change Law and the Civil Society for Action (SCAC) collective point out the lack of a human rights focus and the absence of indigenous consultation both in the Climate Change Framework bill (PLMCC) and in the development of Chile’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC).
CRISIS UPON CRISIS…THE SAME CRISIS?
Both climate change and the emergence of pandemics are related to the different forms of extractivism – the exploitation of natural resources for raw material export without added value – that exist on the planet. They both have the greatest impact on the same groups: indigenous communities, peasant farmers, marginal city dwellers, Afro-descendant people and migrants. Though the systemic crisis is the result of the devastating action not of humanity but rather of a powerful minority, its effects will be paid for by the large majority. Only a year after the last flood, the arrival of COVID-19 in San Pedro de Atacama paralysed tourism, leaving the town in deep economic crisis and its inhabitants in a state of desperation that resulted in a mass exodus caused by the precarity of work in the tourism sector and the high cost of living in the area. Faced with this, local organizations called on the government and mining companies to temporarily cease their operations to avoid contagion brought in by workers. Nevertheless, mining continued across the region with the blessing of the government, and the number of cases skyrocketed. As in the rest of the world (8), the crisis has also been used by mining companies in the region to launder their reputation.
THE SPECTRE OF DROUGHT
In Chile, the industrial and mining sectors consume nearly 40% of the energy matrix that is responsible for 77.4% of the country’s greenhouse gas emission (9). It is extractivist mining – that causes large socioenvironmental impacts – which is currently expanding as a direct effect of the demand for lithium and copper by the electric vehicle market. More than emissions, though, inhabitants of San Pedro de Atacama are concerned about the water insecurity caused by excessive use of water by the mining sector, aggravating the effects of more than a decade of drought. This crisis is manifesting itself as a hydric imbalance that is causing the drying-up of rivers and aquifers. This is affecting the lakes and wetlands around the edges of the salt flat and in the mountains high above, ecosystems that are home to highly vulnerable endemic species and many of which are protected by law. The wetlands and oases of the Atacama Basin also regulate the desert temperature and capture CO2; they are living weapons against climate change that are disappearing under the impotent gaze of communities and environmentalists. The Chilean state, despite authorising the use of water and brine by mining companies, does not have hydrogeological data that would enable us to determine the real impact of lithium and copper mining on the ecosystem (10).
MOVING FORWARDS ON ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Between the climate crisis, the pandemic and the expansion of mining, the Salar de Atacama continues to be yet another example of environmental injustice. The eco-extractivist consensus that seeks to create a zero-emissions version of unsustainable ways of life has created a race to grab resources (11), a race that will produce socioenvironmental impacts and geopolitical consequences for Global South nations that we are yet to understand. In this context, climate justice must be the starting point for a process of collective reflection on the environmental debt of wealthy nations and the right of communities in the Global South to exist… and to say no. Recognising the urgency of limiting global greenhouse gas emissions but also the environmental and social impacts of an extractivism-driven energy transition, new ideas are emerging (12) that seek a new deal for societies which, as well as the climate emergency, are facing the challenge of a post-pandemic economic revival that threatens to deepen the socioenvironmental conflicts of the Global South.
For Chile and the Salar de Atacama, the new constitutional process which has been driven by mass social upheaval in the country will be an historic moment and an opportunity to design a constitution that is plurinational, post-extractivist, unpatriarchal and agro-ecological, protecting life and equality.
1. Government of Chile, ‘Chile’s Nationally Determined Contribution Update 2020’ https://www4.unfccc.int/sites/ ndcstaging/PublishedDocuments/Chile%20First/Chile%27s_NDC_2020_english.pdf
2. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, ‘Indigenous peoples: climate change’ https://www.un.org/development/ desa/indigenouspeoples/climate-change.html
3. For the aftermath of a flood in Toconao, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=26&v=AhlNTNAqGM&feature=emb_logo
4. Everton Fox, ‘Chile’s Atacama Desert hit by flooding’ (February 19, 2012) https://www.aljazeera.com/ weather/2012/02/201221694657519493.html
5. Tom di Liberto, ‘Flooding in Chile’s Atacama Desert after years’ worth of rain in one day’ (April 16, 2015) https://www. climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/flooding-chile%E2%80%99s-atacama-desert-after-years%E2%80%99-worthrain-one-day
6. Richard Davies, ‘Chile – Deaths and Evacuations After Floods in Atacama and Coquimbo’ (May 15, 2017) http://floodlist. com/america/chile-floods-atacama-coquimbo-may-2017
7. Daniela Guzman, ‘World’s Driest Desert Floods as Extreme Weather Hits Chile’ (February 8, 2019) https://www. bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-08/world-s-driest-desert-floods-as-extreme-weather-conditions-mount
8. ‘Voices from the Ground: How the Global Mining Industry is Profiting from the COVID-19 Pandemic 2020’ https:// miningwatch.ca/sites/default/files/covid-19_and_mining_snapshot_report_-_web_version.pdf
9. Informe del Inventario Nacional de Gases de Efecto Invernadero de Chile 2017 Ministerio del Medio Ambiente https:// mma.gob.cl/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/2016_iin_cl.pdf
10. Dave Sherwood, ‘(Spanish) Environmental Judge asks for hydrological study of “fragile” Atacama Salt Flat‘ (July 27, 2020) https://lta.reuters.com/articulo/mineria-chile-litio-idLTAKCN24S1BP-OUSLT
11. Patrick Wintour, ’Five Eyes alliance could expand in scope to counteract China’ (29 July 2020) https://www.theguardian. com/uk-news/2020/jul/29/five-eyes-alliance-could-expand-in-scope-to-counteract-china
12. E.g. Green New Deal(s): A Resource List for Political Ecologists – July 16, 2020 https://undisciplinedenvironments. org/2020/07/16/green-new-deals-a-resource-list-for-political-ecologists/
