Addressing the challenge of water scarcity in Chile

Sea spray blurs the view of towering cliffs of Chile’s central northern coastline, hiding the high, dry region of Atacama behind it.

Hidden under the reddish desert soil are significant deposits of copper and lithium, iron ore, silver and gold. Nearly half of the region’s GDP comes from mining – and accounts for $9 out of every $10 of its exports.

But rainfall in Central Chile has dropped by a third in the past decade. Prolonged droughts are increasing along with climate change, and inadequate water management magnifies the problem for these water-intensive industries.

The mining sector has made a considerable shift to using desalinated seawater from the many plants producing it along Chile’s coastline since around 2011.

However, desalinated seawater takes a lot of energy, emissions and construction to produce; it increases the cost of water supply; there is still unequal access to water for people and sectors; and the new pipelines and associated infrastructure are expensive and contested.

As the largest global copper producer, Chile supplied nearly one-third of the copper produced in 2020 (28.5 per cent), with a value of more than US$33 billion. Copper and lithium are critical not only for traditional electrical appliances, but also enable industry to create renewable energy storage/batteries and electric cars.

Steadily increasing demand already outstrips the world’s capacity to produce copper and lithium, signalling Chile’s important role in future supply.

Stream 1 – Developing tools for non-experts and for experts to use

Led by Dr Liliana Pagliero in Brisbane, this stream aimed to validate whether the project was feasible, and to look at its value.

Workshops with water users in Atacama – including Indigenous and rural communities, public agencies and institutions, agriculture and mining companies – helped to identify a wide range of opportunities, risks and constraints.

Two tools were identified to support better planning for water systems:

1. a simplified, visual tool publicly available for non-experts to explore interconnected water supply options and inform decision-making
2. a comprehensive, algorithm-based tool for water-planning experts in the public or private sectors to identify and analyse reliable, sustainable and cost-efficient solutions.

Stream 2 – Working with local communities to engage and foster sectoral collaboration

Stakeholder engagement is critical to the project. In Chile, conflicts over water use and mining can be very divisive, so the team began by identifying the key stakeholder and impacted groups – focusing on engaging three main sectors: mining, agriculture and public institutions.

In separate workshops, those key groups and the project team discussed the group’s perspective and the potential benefits of taking part in the project.

“It was essential for the project to develop strong working relationships with the region’s water users, suppliers and managers as potential partners – otherwise the tools would not meet users’ needs,” Dr Aitken said.

The two areas of need that these partners contribute to are:

• creating a database to build water supply and demand models
• helping validate the models for supply and demand of water, together with optimisation tools.