Maria Laura Castillo, High Andean Wetlands Program at FARN
The narratives of the Global North's energy transition model promote lithium mining as a solution to the climate change crisis, based on the use of this mineral in batteries for renewable energy storage. However, the greatest demand for lithium comes from the car industry, to power individual electric vehicle batteries.
Today, the geopolitical race for control of the supply chain of minerals for such transition increases the pressure on the countries that possess them, and is jeopardizing the integrity of the ecosystems in which they are found, their associated biodiversity, and favoring dynamics of human rights violations.
The International Energy Agency projects that the demand for lithium for battery production will increase up to 42 times by 2040 compared to 2020, while the Inter-American Development Bank forecasts that it will be 1036% higher than 2020 levels. These estimates, however, are not clear, and focus mainly on individual mobility, leaving aside public transportation.
In this regard, the transition model does not question the hyper-consumption paradigm that has generated the current multiple crises. High-income countries consume about twice the world average of energy and minerals per capita, yet no urgency in reducing demand for environmental goods is raised.
Neither does this model adequately address the impacts it generates on the environment and human rights. Projections show that meeting the extraordinary demand for lithium will require a massive acceleration of its production and processing in a short period of time, which exacerbates environmental pressures on ecosystems and communities.
A key fact: more than half of the minerals considered “critical” are on or near indigenous lands.
Andean wetlands in Argentina, Chile and Bolivia - which together account for around 53% of the world's lithium brine reserves - are home to indigenous communities that have inhabited them since ancestral times based on “Buen Vivir” (good living) and play a key role as guardians of biodiversity.
These fragile ecosystems are located in arid zones with a negative natural annual water balance, where water is the element that defines life. Due to their function as water regulators, they are key to adaptation to climate change. Likewise, through vegetation and microorganisms adapted to their extreme conditions, they sequester and store CO2, which is central to climate change mitigation.
Paradoxically, in the name of an alleged fight against climate change, lithium mining - classified as water mining - directly undermines these contributions, and may even release greenhouse gasses stored in wetlands.
The GBF sets clear targets to address biodiversity loss, which must be acted upon in a participatory manner and in consultation with indigenous communities. However, lithium mining is advancing in several cases against these precepts, without information, without participation, without adequate environmental impact assessment processes, and without the consent of indigenous communities.
The global climate, biodiversity and pollution crises demand a comprehensive approach that modifies the unsustainable patterns that perpetuate environmental degradation and the subjugation of human rights.
States should establish clear commitments and move forward with concrete actions to advance towards comprehensive socioecological transitions built participatively, based on the pillars of human rights and in full respect of planetary boundaries.