De-politicising seawater desalination: Environmental Impact Assessments in the Atacama mining Region, Chile

Highlights

• Desalination exposes host communities to hydro-social and environmental impacts.

• EIAs are found to de-politicize desalination within the Chilean context.

• The regulatory process results in shortcomings in public participation.

• Mitigation and compensation plans are inadequate for addressing impacts.

• The energy implications of desalinated water expansion are not adequately disclosed.

Abstract

The construction of desalination plants is proliferating worldwide. In Chile, seawater purification technologies are framed as a tool for confronting water scarcity, stabilizing water provision and optimizing overall water availability while minimizing impacts on groundwater resources. Yet, local communities hosting desalination facilities in their territories are still confronting ongoing water-related inequities. The aim of this paper is to analyse how Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and Declarations of Environmental Impact (DIAs) fit with the assessment and mitigation of socio-environmental implications of desalination. While they are intended to highlight and minimize negative impacts, and address them as part of the approval process prior to the construction of these facilities, we see instead how they are at times marshalled in ways that enable negative socio-environmental outcomes. Thorough analysis of EIAs (1994–2018) and DIAs (2010–2018) of mining companies in the Atacama region our research revealed shortcomings concerning public participation, mitigation and compensation plans, and water-energy management. This occurs, in part, through the depoliticization (or rendering technical) of desalination, in ways that obscure uneven and negative socio-environmental outcomes.

Introduction

The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (1992), the Summits of the Americas (1994) and the Declaration of Santa Cruz de la Sierra (1996 and 2006), set important precedents for the challenge of regional sustainable development. For instance, the participation of several countries in these initiatives gave a boost to the promotion and strengthening of environmental regulations and encouraged citizen participation (Bastida, 2002; Pulgar-Vidal and Aurazo, 2003). A key milestone was the implementation of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) – nowadays a universal required tool prior to approval of new development projects (Bastida, 2002; Bond et al., 2019). While the EIA was developed to serve environmental management, support decision-making and deliver accountability on potential and foreseeable impacts of new projects, many have questioned the tool’s ‘effectiveness’ in diverse contexts (Morgan, 2006; Cashmore et al., 2010; Bond et al., 2019). While ‘effectiveness’ is difficult to assess, concerns have been expressed about participation processes, compensation and mitigation mechanisms, cumulative effects, transboundary effects and social impacts (O’Faircheallaigh, 2010; Lostarnau et al., 2011; Morgan, 2012; Zhang et al., 2013; Bidstrup et al., 2016; Elvan, 2018). Other work has suggested that EIA processes rarely identify significant impacts, with practitioners most commonly relying upon ‘utilitarian’ and ‘corrective’ framings e.g., mitigation and compensation strategies (Hugé et al., 2017). Therefore, critical accounts of the EIA process suggest that decisions are being driven by political interests and relations of power e.g., via access to scientific knowledge production (Cashmore et al., 2010; Cashmore and Richardson, 2013; Spiegel, 2017). For the analysis that follows, we do not aim to evaluate the effectiveness of EIAs, rather we are interested in the specific mechanisms of the process that contribute to depoliticization by enabling approvals, particularly by obscuring potential hydro-social and environmental impacts. We engage the concept of hydro-social to highlight the necessary embeddedness of the water cycle within social structures and technological infrastructure (Linton and Budds, 2014). This is particularly apt given our interest in analyzing the diverse socio-ecological considerations related to EIAs in the context of seawater desalination in Chile.

Desalination proponents often herald this technology as a new water supply compatible with sustainability and climate change adaptation that is enabling the sustainable growth of cities and the expansion and diversification of industry and other forms of production. However, some environmental concerns about the technology are emerging e.g. brine disposal in marine environments and CO₂ emissions (Cooley et al., 2006; Wilder et al., 2016). While such concerns have been identified in the scientific literature, few have considered whether or not EIAs recognize these impacts, or engender specific pathways or requirements to reduce or avoid them (Hoepner, 1999; Lattemann and Höpner, 2008). In fact, while there is a large body of work on SEIAs, there is an outstanding need to consider the socio-environmental impacts of desalination expansion. Thus, a range of considerations are important for further investigation regarding the relationship between EIAs/DIAs and desalination, including the ways that EIA processes deal with issues of social acceptability, implications for regional energy supply, and attendant redistribution of water resources (Liu et al., 2013; Fuentes-Bargues, 2014).

From political ecology and critical geography perspectives, it is clear that desalination has potentially important consequences for water governance, inequality, as well as livelihoods and ecosystems (Meerganz von Medeazza, 2005; Feitelson and Rosenthal, 2012; McEvoy and Wilder, 2012; McEvoy, 2014; Barau and Hosani, 2015; Swyngedouw and Williams, 2016; Loftus and March, 2016; Usher, 2018; Fragkou, 2018). This prior work has also highlighted the ways that desalination technology and management fits within the broader political economic context. For instance, scholars have suggested that desalination has been politicised by offering new opportunities for the insertion of private capital into water management, furthering neoliberal agendas (e.g. public-private partnerships and infrastructure co-location), supporting developmental logics (e.g. tourism, mining and agriculture) and solving transboundary contestations over water (Swyngedouw, 2013; Aviram et al., 2014; Williams, 2018a, b; Fragkou, 2018). To date, this critical research vein has focused on power dynamics that lend force to the desalination trend, highlighting various water policies, contracts/agreements and co-locations with other infrastructure, as key dimensions that lead to particular outcomes in diverse contexts. These studies open up a range of questions related to how desalination fits with ongoing political economic considerations through contributing to persisting inequalities or consolidation of power. However, research on these themes to date has not yet analyzed the specific role of EIAs/DIAs in the ongoing reconfiguration of hydro-social realities. Engaging analysis of EIAs has nonetheless been recognized as important to facilitating the ongoing implementation of desalination infrastructure, as evidenced by a report from the United Nations Environment Programme-UNEP (2008), which specifically considers the important role of EIAs for desalination approvals e.g., via setting expectations in terms of public participation and recognizing implications for the water-energy nexus.

This paper offers an analysis of EIAs/DIAs in the Chilean context engaging some of these questions about how this mechanism presumably intended to mitigate negative socio-environmental effects, instead contributes to uneven and negative hydro-social outcomes by sidestepping key concerns. We find that EIAs/ DIAs fail to engage with a broad range of socio-ecological and political considerations, and instead consider a relatively narrow scope of potential impacts that could arise through desalination, particularly through focus on technical matters. We highlight this as part of our argument that details the depoliticization of the EIA/DIA mechanism, referring to the ways that the issues and stakes of the proposed facilities are framed as matters solely of engineering or technological debate, while political, economic, or equity considerations are not mentioned, as such enabling ‘the symbolic and material institutionalization of socio-ecological orders’ (per Swyngedouw, 2014). We observe that this depoliticization is achieved through three particular aspects of the EIA/DIA process: exclusions as part of public participation, mitigation and compensation plans to easy desalination approvals, and narrowly framed water-energy management. By looking beyond desalination as a technological construct, and instead to how economic power relations are effectively reconfigured, we aim to shed light on the particularly role of EIAs/DIAs in this process. With this contribution, our aim is twofold: first, to document corporate narratives in EIAs on desalination technologies to show how they are critical in the way that socio-environmental impacts are deployed, and second, to illustrate loopholes in the EIA/DIA process that enables important socio-ecological considerations to be sidestepped. First, we start by presenting our analytical and methodological framework. Second, we present the results and discussion section, followed by the conclusions.