‘The source of all life is here’: plan to mine lithium in Chilean salt flat sparks fears of water scarcity

Salar de Maricunga in the Atacama region. Rio Tinto and the state-owned copper mining company Codelco plan to extract lithium from Chile’s second-largest salt flat, but there is growing opposition in communities across the region. Photograph: AP

Miriam Rivera Bordones tends her goats in a dusty paddock in the russet mountains of Chile’s Atacama desert. She also keeps chickens and has planted quince and peach trees and grapevines, which are watered by a stream winding down the hills towards the Indigenous community of Copiapó.

But now the huge British-Australian mining multinational Rio Tinto has signed a deal to extract lithium, the “white gold” of the energy transition, from a salt flat farther up the mountains, and she fears the project could affect the water sources of several communities in the area.