Is Chile's glacier protection bill flawed?

A bill to protect Chile’s glaciers and prohibit mining in surrounding areas has been stuck in congress since October 2019, as the country’s mining authorities have called for better definitions of glaciers, periglacial areas and permafrost. 

Since the bill was first submitted in 2018, representatives of the industry have warned that the bill’s conceptual ambiguity could cause uncertainty in the sector, while this week Chilean glaciologist Pablo Wainstein told reporters in Santiago that the bill is not “operationally applicable” as it stands. 

“The bill contains a mistake, which is mixing something that you can identify spatially [glaciers] with something you cannot spatially identify [permafrost],” he said during the meeting. 

“You can’t spatially delimit where activity can and cannot be done. Operability is the big mistake. It’s not an operationally applicable bill,” he told reporters. 

According to Wainstein, the bill seeks to protect permafrost and periglacial areas, which both involve very large areas of land. Permafrost covers the Andean mountains at different altitudes, so prohibiting any economic activity in permafrost areas could mean, for example, that certain roads required in the future could not be built. 

Data from the mining ministry indicates that if the bill were to be approved in its current form without any changes, Codelco’s El Teniente and Andina copper mines would have to stop operations and more than 30,000 jobs could be lost. 

Last week, Codelco CEO Octavio Araneda told the senate’s mining committee that the country’s north central area is the most interesting for exploration, but the approval of the glacier bill could block any chance for new mining discoveries in that area. 

Diego Hernández, the head of mining association Sonami, recently said that the glacier bill “is an anti-mining law,” and if it were approved Codelco would lose half of its assets. 

Chile has 21,647km2 of glaciers and 83.7% are already protected by law as they are within national parks and reserves. The current bill represents the sixth attempt since 2005 to protect all of the country’s glaciers.

But instead of a new bill Wainstein suggests improving regulatory entities by adding tools to study mountain basins in depth and evaluating potential impacts of mining projects on a case-by-case basis. 

“Sometimes we want to over-regulate ourselves, but the answer is simple: let's do comprehensive, holistic studies to know the effects better,” he said.

The senate’s mining committee will meet again this week to review all of the proposed amendments once again before voting.

Photo credit: Codelco