Communities around the world have the right to say NO to mining

Panamanian society regards copper mining as a serious national problem

 

Between October and November 2023, copper mining sparked the largest social unrest the country had seen in more than three decades. The Panamanian people do not believe that copper mining (in this case by the mining company Cobre Panamá) contributes to their country’s development; on the contrary, they see it as destroying rainforest, polluting water and eroding Panama’s sovereignty. 

The controversial mine lies within the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor. The intense protests culminated in the extraordinary enactment of a mining moratorium prohibiting the granting of new metal mining licenses. The current government is attempting to lift the moratorium, against the will of the public as expressed in protests on the streets of the capital and the country’s major cities. 

 

Women in Indonesia criminalized for denouncing impacts of nickel extraction on Sulawesi

In Southeast Sulawesi, in the community of Torobulu, residents are challenging the allegedly illegal activities of a mining company that is extracting nickel just a few meters from their homes. Drone footage (https://youtu.be/SDYdD54ZlXg?si=DGumnYwMLuIqN3m8) shows houses on the verge of collapsing into the pits dug by the mining machinery as it excavates the earth to extract nickel. Several people have been criminalized and harassed by judicial authorities with the aim of silencing their protests against the living conditions they are forced to endure, the human rights violations and the destruction of the surrounding natural environment. Resistance to mining is led in particular by women – mothers and grandmothers – who find themselves literally surrounded by mining and its impacts on their bodies. Their urgent priority is to defend the health and lives of their families and, by extension, their dignity and integrity. Beyond the lives of the region’s inhabitants, pollution caused by mining, its infrastructure – ports, processing plants, power stations, industrial buildings and roads – damages the natural environment and water sources, destroys forests and family farms, and harms nature. These serious impacts of nickel mining are spreading across the entire island of Sulawesi.

Indonesia is the world’s leading producer of nickel and the country with the largest known reserves. Its global supply has grown very rapidly over the last decade, driven by demand for electric vehicle batteries and stainless steel, for which nickel is a key component that makes the steel more resistant to corrosion. Production has risen from just two smelters producing 100,000 tons in 2014 to producing around 2.4–2.5 million tons of nickel in 2025, giving Indonesia control of more than 60 percent of the global supply. Paradoxically, to supply energy to the nickel mines – an industry ostensibly intended to help curb climate change – several coal-fired power stations are being built on Sulawesi, with coal brought in from other Indonesian islands, making this a major contributor to climate change.
 

Indigenous Pala’wan push back against nickel extraction in Palawan, Philippines

Nickel mining companies are scrambling to carve up untouched landscapes in the Palawan Man & Biosphere Reserve, brazenly pushing ahead even in the face of an officially approved mining‑moratorium ordinance. The livelihoods of Indigenous communities, farmers, and fisherfolk are being pushed to the brink. What is at stake is not only land but culture, food security, and the living memory of generations.

Indigenous Pala’wan have practiced sustainable farming and fishing for generations, and this is what has protected the forest in the once-pristine municipality of Brooke’s Point. Every time it rains, the sea turns brown, affecting the lobsters. “Our daily catch keeps shrinking. Starvation is at the doorstep,” a fisher from Maasin testifies. “Now the government forbids us to open new swidden [traditional slash-and-burn fields] to feed our families, while mining companies are allowed to clear-cut old forests. We have practiced sustainable farming for generations,” says one Pala’wan elder. While this is happening, mining companies are branding their operations as “responsible” mining, claiming that their presence protects forests from slash-and-burn agriculture.

Communities are mobilizing and standing together to protect their ancestral lands, their waters, and their children’s future. On March 25, around 100 Pala’wan women and youth marched through the streets of Brooke’s Point to defend their ancestral lands and demand an end to large-scale mining expansion in Southern Palawan. Their courage is echoing far beyond Palawan’s shores. Young people don’t want to inherit devastated land. Their call for justice – and for the protection of ancestral territories – must be heard. International organizations are standing with local communities and backing their call to stop destructive mining once and for all.

 

Lithium mining in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia involves large-scale water extraction

In the Chilean, Bolivian and Argentine Andean region of South America, wetlands and salt flats are under threat, along with Ramsar sites and Indigenous territories. Lithium is mined under an unsustainable and exploitative extractivist model, with the raw material obtained through evaporation of water previously pumped to the Earth surface. This process removes vast quantities of water from the Puna, a desert region inhabited by Indigenous communities with their own economic systems and a direct need for that water. Water is scarce and supply is precarious; any damage to wetlands puts their survival at risk.

The Plurinational Observatory of the Salt Flats in Latin America (OPSAL) reports that the presence of mining companies is also driving an end to pastoralism and threatening species found in the salt flats. There are fewer “parina” – the Aymara name for a type of red-legged greater flamingo of the genus Phenicoparrus, native to the high Andean salt flats. Mining is also threatening tourism, on which many communities depend for their livelihoods. Communities can live without mining, but the expanding global battery industry shows no sign of curbing its growth.

In the southern Altiplano, in the department of Potosí – Bolivia’s poorest – lies the Uyuni salt flat. Lithium extraction projects have been approved there even though local communities were already living under water rationing. Some concessions are large and long-term, yet there has been too little public discussion of mining’s long-term environmental impacts and no proper consultation with affected communities as required by law.

The Colla people of the Chilean Andes live by moving with their animals between lower and higher ground as the seasons change. In winter they stay below 3,000 meters, and in summer they move higher into the Atacama mountains. The communities share water and know exactly what it means: life. “Water must be returned to the Pacha (Mother Earth).” Climate change is already leaving clear marks on the region. Flash floods have destroyed homes, crops and livestock. The Maricunga salt flat is part of the water source for Indigenous communities and their animals. Guanacos, wild relatives of the llama, birds and vegetation all depend on these waters. Yet during the pandemic, one lithium brine project was approved, followed by others.

In Argentina, in the provinces of Salta, Jujuy and Catamarca, several mining projects have been authorized. “The land is priceless,” says Roman Guitian, a community member from Catamarca. After generations of living on the land, he is now watching concessions being granted without any form of prior, free and informed consultation. Many people are wondering what use electric cars and their batteries will be if there is no drinking water. Many families make a living through a salt cooperative and salt handicrafts, or through livestock farming and agriculture. Referring to the mining companies, Verónica Chávez says, “They are coming to destroy our home. With work that provides bread for today but hunger for tomorrow.” This resident of one of the affected communities sees vicuñas, foxes, suri and lizards – as well as all other living beings – as part of her family. For local communities, witnessing this kind of lithium extraction is a source of deep pain.

Governments should protect the communities living in the salt flats rather than the lithium mining companies they currently favor.
 

Lithium extraction in northern Portugal does not have local support

The proposed open pit Mina do Barroso would wipe out traditional agriculture in the municipality of Boticas, in the villages of Covas do Barroso and Romainho, and runs directly against the will of local residents. The plan is promoted by the company Savannah Resources, in a region recognized by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS), where local people depend on access to pastureland and communal areas for their subsistence. The company applied for an Administrative Easement to carry out drilling and geotechnical works across approximately 228 hectares of private and communal land (“baldios”). This would allow it to occupy private and community-owned land, overriding the wishes of individual owners and the Commoners of the Baldios, which immediately led communities to file a complaint. Previously, communities had already experienced abuses of authority under similar circumstances “outside the licensed area, [with] restrictions placed on residents’ movement within the communal land, and the installation of private security guards in the village, thereby creating a climate of surveillance over the local population” according to the association United in Defense of Covas do Barroso. “On several occasions, the GNR (National Republican Guard) also sought to intimidate and isolate landowners in order to dissuade them from protesting the company’s forced entry onto their land.” The declaration of the Barroso lithium project as a Strategic Project under the Critical Raw Materials Act has raised serious concerns.