Pia Marchegiani is environmental policy director and deputy director at Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (FARN), and Vanina Corral is FARN’s environmental policy programme officer.
At 3,400 metres (11,150 feet) above sea level in the arid highlands of northwest Argentina, 29-year-old Franco Vedia tends his llamas and fields in the Indigenous community of Tusaquillas – one of more than 30 communities across the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc Basin.
Here, life revolves around a single, sacred element: water, the source that feeds the lagoon, sustains crops and animals, and has anchored centuries of Indigenous life.
The Salinas Grandes, shared between the provinces of Jujuy and Salta, is one of the largest salt flats in South America. Beneath it lies another resource: lithium, the mineral driving the global race for batteries that power the energy transition.
“Lithium activity is water mining,” Franco said. “It consumes vast amounts of water in the Puna – a resource already scarce and extremely valuable here.”
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Across Argentina’s northern provinces, environmental groups warn that lithium extraction has already dried rivers and degraded fragile Andean wetlands. The struggle of the Puna communities mirrors that of others across the Gran Atacama region – spanning Argentina, Chile and Bolivia – the so-called lithium triangle, home to more than half the world’s known reserves.
For communities like Franco’s, the balance kept for generations is breaking under a development model that promises progress at the cost of survival.
“If the water disappears, life disappears,” he added.
Families grow beans, potatoes and corn; raise llamas, sheep, and goats; and weave textiles by hand. In recent years, some have opened small community-based tourism projects. “We want to show the world how we work the land and what it means to us,” Franco said.
Their livelihoods sustain an ancient way of life – one now threatened by the expansion of lithium mining.
The energy transition paradox
Global demand for lithium is soaring as countries in the Global North accelerate their energy transitions. While lithium extraction is often portrayed as a solution to the climate crisis, the extraction process risks irreversible damage to fragile ecosystems such as the Andean wetlands.
Franco reflected on the global paradox of the energy transition: “We all use cellphones, computers and cars. It would be hard to imagine a world without technology. But what’s truly impossible is imagining a world without water.”
In the Andean cosmovision – a worldview that sees nature as part of the community – water is a living being. “When a water source is destroyed, a part of the community is destroyed. Without water, there is no balance and no existence,” Franco added.
A decade of community resistance
For more than 10 years, the Indigenous communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc have resisted the entry of lithium companies. Mining projects have advanced without basin-wide environmental assessments or reliable baseline data – in a region already parched and vulnerable to climate change.
Their defence is not only of water and life, but of human rights: the right to information, participation and free, prior, and informed consent, guaranteed under the the UN-brokered Escazu Agreement, and the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169, a binding agreement concerning the rights of Indigenous peoples.
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To protect their rights, the communities have taken their claims to national and international courts and created the Kachi Yupi Biocultural Protocol, defining how consultation must take place. Supported by organizations such as FARN (Environment and Natural Resources Foundation), they are building networks of technical and legal assistance.
Franco emphasised the importance of developing these networks to protect their territory: “It is very important for us that support comes from within, from our own people and from those individuals and organisations who want to defend life, the territory, Mother Earth, and the cosmovision of Buen Vivir.”
The road to COP30 in Belém
Franco will bring the voice of the Salinas Grandes to COP30 in Belém, Brazil.
“We want to show the world what is happening in our territories. Many communities across Latin America face the same situation. We need to unite our voices to defend water, human rights, and our collective right to live,” he said.
As the energy transition accelerates and minerals like lithium are treated as the next frontier, Franco carries an ancestral truth: “Water is worth more than lithium – because without water there is no life.”
Global call to rethink transition model
The defence of the Salinas Grandes Basin is more than a local struggle. It is a global call to rethink an energy-transition model that risks repeating the extractivism it claims to replace.
A truly just transition must respect community rights and participation, safeguard the ecosystems on which life depends, and place justice, equity and human rights at its core. The extraction of so-called critical minerals cannot repeat the same logic that has long harmed Indigenous peoples and degraded nature.
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As COP30 gets underway, the proposed Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) – a civil-society call for a global just transition rooted in rights and ecological integrity – offers a path towards the transformation Franco’s community demands.
His message to Belém is simple and urgent: “The energy transition cannot be built on the destruction of water. True progress means caring for life.”
The post “Water is worth more than lithium,” Indigenous Argentine community tells COP30 appeared first on Climate Home News.
“Water is worth more than lithium,” Indigenous Argentine community tells COP30
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.