On Wednesday, January 14, the Antofagasta Region Evaluation Commission gave a favorable rating to the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) "Desarrollo Futuro DMH" (DMH Future Development) presented by Codelco, which will allow the mine's useful life to be extended until 2054. In this process, the consulting firm that provided expert judgment support on the indigenous human component was EIS Ambiental, whose objective was to implement a due diligence process in the assessment of social impacts, Early Citizen Participation, formal participation once the EIA was submitted, and the design and strategy for accompanying the indigenous consultation process by the Owner, with a focus on traceability, cultural relevance, and the conditions affecting Human Groups Belonging to Indigenous Peoples (indigenous communities and associations) likely to be directly affected by the project.
The project was approved in 890 days, which is less than the national average for EIAs, which is 1,035 days, providing regulatory certainty and predictability regarding investment timelines. This marks a clear trend in projects that have been approved with indigenous consultation processes in the Antofagasta region, averaging 849 days of processing, which is 186 days less than the national average, representing an 18% reduction in processing times in the Environmental Impact Assessment System.
The process included an unprecedented Indigenous Consultation,which involved 46 Human Groups Belonging to Indigenous Peoples (GHPPI). Among the 83 Indigenous Consultation processes carried out by the Environmental Assessment Service (SEA), this was the largest ever recorded in the history of the SEIA. This scale required the Project Owner to conduct an exhaustive characterization of the indigenous component in the area of influence and to employ a particularly robust methodological approach: 49 anthropological reports were prepared, 46 of which were based on primary sources.
Of the 46 indigenous communities and associations with a resolution to begin consultation, 38 signed a Methodological Agreement with the SEA, an instrument that defines how the process will be conducted (measures to be consulted, stages, deadlines, representativeness criteria, and work schedule). Subsequently, 36 GHPPIs signed the Final Agreement Protocol, a milestone that closes the stage of dialogues and agreements and records the agreements and disagreements reached in the process. In practice, this meant that almost all of those consulted who decided to participate formalized the closure through a protocol, setting a historic precedent for the volume of agreements reached in an Indigenous Consultation process in the SEIA.
When submitting the project to the SEIA, the project owner declared four significant impacts, which were ratified by the SEA in its resolution to initiate the Indigenous Consultation Process, beginning in January 2024. First, (1) an impact was identified due to the risk to the health of the population with respect to GHPPI, given that Article 5 of the RSEIA highlights this effect and, in the case of the indigenous population, recognized as a protected population under Law No. 19,253 or the Indigenous Law, there is a likelihood of direct impact, enabling consultation in accordance with Article 8 of the RSEIA, particularly due to the location close to a protected population. Additionally, three significant impacts related to the landscape were declared as a result of the growth in height of the tailings dump and its effects on (2) the cultural landscape and feelings of belonging, (3) ceremonial practices at Cerro la Cruz, and (4) Cerro La Cruz in its status as heritage site and viewpoint.
However, based on observations from citizens and indigenous communities and associations, the minister promoted substantive changes in the design and distribution of the landfill, redistributing it across three landfills and placing them further away from the population, avoiding visual interference with protected hills and safeguarding the continuity of the natural environment in the landscape. As a result, the effects associated with these interventions were reclassified as impacts 2, 3, and 4 as insignificant, falling outside the scope of the consultation. Considering that the objective of the indigenous consultation in the SEIA is to address the mitigation, remediation, and/or compensation measures proposed to address the significant impacts assessed by the SEA, and due to the dismissal of three significant impacts, the dialogue then focused on the health risk to the population in GHPPI.
Both the identification of impacts at the start of the EIA and the rejection of significance presented in Addendum 1 were reviewed and substantiated in an original technical annex to the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), entitled "Analysis of Susceptibility to Direct Impact (ASAD) on Human Groups Belonging to Indigenous Peoples." This annex applies a methodology based on Social Impact Assessment (SIA), adapted to the current environmental regulatory framework (RSEIA and evaluation criteria for the indigenous human component), adding the criteria of the rulings of the Environmental Courts and the Supreme Court on matters affecting GHPPI, ways of life and customs, and significance assessment. In this case, the annexes to the ASAD chapters made it possible to analyze in a traceable manner how the redistribution of the landfill into three deposits and its removal from sensitive receptors led to the dismissal of significant impact on the cultural landscape, by reducing visual interference and the perceived alteration of the continuity of the environment.
Codelco structured the EIA "Desarrollo Futuro DMH" under a standard of due diligence that sought to go beyond formal compliance, beginning with early citizen participation with standards for indigenous peoples' rights that it maintained throughout the EIA process: it enabled material and technical conditions for the effective participation of the GHPPI, developed accessible communication with cultural relevance (explanatory comic), and maintained early and continuous engagement through meetings and contact mechanisms reinforced with cultural relevance, all of which allowed it to build robust agreements with the GHPPI on its commitments. This was supported by a robust system of traceability, minutes, backups, and means of verification for each GHPPI, and by analysis tools such as ASAD, aimed at substantiating and making transparent the identification and discarding of impacts on ways of life and customs. This management is systematized in the annex "Due Diligence with Indigenous Peoples in the SEIA," an original document from EIS Ambiental focused on demonstrating evidence-based decision-making, transparency, and traceability of the actions taken by the Proponent to provide the necessary conditions for indigenous communities and associations to participate and have an informed influence on the environmental assessment process.
In a region such as Antofagasta, with a large indigenous population and where many projects involve indigenous communities and associations in their area of influence, institutional capacity to lead these processes is a determining factor. In the case of DMH, the SEA's accumulated experience in applying ILO Convention 169, after more than 16 years of implementation in Chile, together with its teams' knowledge of the territory and regional social dynamics, was key to successfully guiding the largest Indigenous Consultation process in the history of the SEIA. Added to this was the expertise of Codelco's Sustainability and Community Affairs teams in the design and implementation of a due diligence and relationship strategy, which created enabling conditions for sustaining dialogue and reaching agreements. All of this was achieved through the committed, multidisciplinary work and clear, established internal governance for the process of teams from various areas of the Proponent.
What happened sets a practical precedent: even in highly complex social scenarios, due to the magnitude and diversity of the GHPPIs likely to be directly affected, it is possible to meet the deadlines for processing an EIA when the process is designed and implemented based on due diligence standards. This is because due diligence reduces information asymmetries, anticipates controversies, strengthens the legitimacy of dialogue, and focuses the discussion on traceable impacts and measures, avoiding unproductive iterations and delays due to a lack of conditions for participation. In this logic, a well-designed and executed Indigenous Consultation is not an obstacle to environmental assessment: it is a critical component of its quality, predictability, and sustainability over time, and precisely for this reason, it provides certainty regarding deadlines and implementation and contributes to projects generating a long-term relationship with the territory.
