News came out yesterday that the First Environmental Court of Chile in the Antofagasta region has accepted for processing the claims made by the Colla Pai Ote Indigenous Community (which I think is referenced by MSB as the Chañaral communities that are set to receive $ from proyecto blanco). This claim was made tuesday 2/14/23 almost the last day of the window for such claims to be made. From what I can tell environmental court claims can be made up to 30 business-days (or 6 weeks) after notification of RCA approval of a project (which was 1/4/23). The environmental court is the last legal opportunity to derail a RCA project, so in this respect it is the final procedural move that parties can make to challenge the validity of an approved RCA project.
News article Link and here is the
Link to this first environmental court case documents. The case rol# is 85-2023
I have not read the details of the claims in this court case but from what the article says their main claims are:
1. "EIA (Environmental Impact Study) of the Blanco project, the environmental authority did not meet with the Colla communities, in order to collect their opinions, analyze them and determine the origin of the application of the anticipated term to the evaluation procedure"
2. "the environmental authority has repeatedly and arbitrarily validated, including in the resolution challenged, the owner's statement that his project will not generate significant impacts in relation to the indigenous community of Colla de Pai Ote”.
3. potential impacts that the project could generate such as "the location close to populations, areas and protected wetlands likely to be affected and the importance of existing water resources within indigenous territories."
These claims do not seem very appropriate for this specific court due to the Environmental courts mostly being a place to challenge the science that is made to approve RCA projects. Also the specific claims themselves do not seem very impactful on the RCA development and process, just IMO. Seems like this case is not much to worry about IMO.
In ~April 2022 the Second Environmental Court of Chile in the Santiago region had accepted for processing the claims made by the "Comunidad Indígena Colla de la Comuna de Copiapó". This case has been on hold until yesterday or today due to needing to wait for other potential claims to be filed within the 30 business-day window after the RCA was approved on 1/4/23. This case basically argues that the clay core layer in the maricunga does not hydro-logically separate the top wetland region from the lower brine region that MSB intends to exploit. There has been lots of studies on this and the science seems pretty clear, and the approved RCA clearly acknowledges this IMO. Also the administrative review of the RCA that is now finished was directly related to this clay core issue and resulted in 3 additional control wells to measure this.
To get to the documents
for this case you can use this link. and then enter rol # 333 and year 2022 in the search box.
Overall this unfortunate that the Pai Ote community has started a new case 85-2023 in the First Environmental Court. But I see this mostly as a procedural issue and it does not seem to me that the claims are significant enough for the courts to halt the project. We might have to wait two weeks before we get a update on this case.
As for the case 333-2022 in the Second Environmental Court. I think this case should get an update as soon as next week because the case has been on hold up until a couple days ago. Also this case is pretty directly to do with the administrative review made just before RCA final approval on 1/4/23, because of this I think that this case is likely to not have major impacts on that status of our project and should hopefully be wrapped up soon. Not to much to worry about IMO.
