Repairing harm: Desalination in copper mining and claims for responsibility in Chile's Atacama Desert

This article examines the experiences of harm from copper mining and claims of responsibility in Chile's Atacama Desert. Chile is the world's top copper producer, yet most of the country's copper reserves are located in regions experiencing extremely high water stress. Recently, copper demand related to the global clean energy transition has further intensified extraction. To secure water access for extractive operations, Chile's mining industry is increasingly turning to desalinated seawater, which it also frames as a practice of responsibility. This study explores how local communities experience mining-related harm on water supplies and claim responsibility in their daily lives in the Atacama Desert, and how these experiences are shaped by corporate discourses and practices of environmental repair. The study draws on recent theorizations in political ecology concerning repair and responsibility in environments damaged by extractivism to analyze how the use of desalinated seawater as a form to repair “harm” influence experiences of (in)justices among Indigenous, peasant and fisher communities across the Atacama waterscape. The findings demonstrate the relational ways in which harm manifests in people's everyday experiences and claims of injustice, as well as extractive industries’ interpretations and practices of responsibility. The study highlights that while the use of desalinated seawater in copper mining may alleviate the urgent water scarcity, underlying environmental suffering and related harm persists.