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As scrutiny continues to accentuate throughout the battery metals provide chain, the dialog round sustainability has moved far past carbon footprints.
At this yr’s Benchmark Week, Stefan Debruyne, director of exterior affairs at Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM) (NYSE:SQM), made that time unmistakably clear: sustainability in lithium is as a lot about folks, course of and transparency as it’s about emissions — and it should be realized, not imposed.
SQM, one of many world’s largest lithium producers, has lengthy been on the middle of debates about extraction in Chile’s Salar de Atacama. However for Debruyne, the corporate’s imaginative and prescient of management goes past scale.
“We method management in a holistic manner,” he mentioned. “It’s not solely about having belief to provide and with the ability to ship the standard the market wants, but additionally doing it in a accountable manner — dialogue, working intently with stakeholders and civil society. We work very exhausting on all parts.”
Constructing social license
A lot of Debruyne’s position over the previous 5 years has centered on bettering engagement with Indigenous communities, a lot of which have deep historic grievances tied to land, water and the influence of large-scale useful resource extraction.
“It’s actually about being one of the best neighbor attainable,” he mentioned.
However getting there has required basic shifts in mindset and methodology. One of many clearest examples is what Debruyne known as the precept of horizontality — a change born from early missteps.
A decade in the past, when communities questioned the mine’s hydrological impacts, SQM responded the way in which many industrial operators would: it despatched engineers to elucidate the technical knowledge.
“You’ll suppose that’s an incredible factor to do,” Debruyne mentioned. “However we realized that’s not the suitable manner, as a result of group members aren’t hydrologists. There’s a vertical distinction.”
As an alternative, SQM now helps communities safe impartial consultants of their selecting, making certain conversations occur “on a horizontal stage.” This shift has been essential to rebuilding belief.
Simply as essential, Debruyne mentioned, is abandoning the western notion of time.
“Communities have a special idea of time. It’s about giving them the time they want — taking info again, returning, iterating. It’s possible you’ll suppose you’re doing issues the suitable manner, however there’s at all times room for enchancment.”
Why social funding reduces danger
For Oxfam coverage advisor Andrew Bogrand, a lot of these modifications should not simply moral — they’re additionally sensible.
The professional, who additionally spoke on the panel, famous that since 2010, greater than 800 protests or violent incidents have occurred round mine websites globally, together with 300 since 2021 alone.
Every one carries actual prices: slowdowns, authorized bills, rising insurance coverage premiums — and, as Bogrand identified, the hidden price of govt time diverted to disaster administration.
“There’s a win-win answer,” he instructed the Benchmark Week viewers. “It’s participating communities, ensuring everybody’s on the identical web page. Typically the options are quite simple.”
For instance, he pointed to mining tasks the place warning messages had been despatched in English to communities that don’t communicate the language, or the place key security info was delivered over SMS when what residents wanted was a bodily noticeboard in their very own dialect.
Bogrand described firms that “step over a greenback to choose up a penny” — refusing modest group requests, solely to face shutdowns costing tens of tens of millions of {dollars}.
Transparency: A instrument, not a risk
Debruyne described transparency as certainly one of SQM’s handiest instruments, even when it initially felt counterintuitive.
Just a few years in the past, the corporate made all hydrological knowledge from its authorities reporting publicly accessible on-line.
“I used to be bracing myself,” he mentioned, anticipating to obtain dozens of questions on brine ranges. However counter to his fears, transparency defused stress relatively than fueling it. “I acquired full silence,” Debruyne famous.
It additionally created a basis for future collaboration, together with joint environmental monitoring applications with communities that had refused to talk with SQM for years.
Transferring sluggish to maneuver quick
The strain between speedy business progress and sluggish, iterative sustainability processes usually surfaces in investor discussions. For Bogrand, the reply is easy: “It’s important to transfer sluggish to maneuver quick.”
Dashing early stage engagement nearly at all times backfires, he argued, whereas early funding in group relationships pays dividends throughout the lifetime of a mine.
Debruyne echoed this concept, noting that persistence, consistency and presence — not guarantees — win belief. In a single case, SQM organized a go to for Atacama Indigenous ladies leaders to electrical car and battery crops in Germany and Poland, permitting them to see firsthand the place lithium matches in a completed product.
One participant, stunned that the steel shaped solely a skinny coating on a cathode, admitted she had imagined an “Avatar-like” state of affairs the place mines destroyed large volumes of land for every battery.
“As a result of they don’t have visibility on the worth chain, they make interpretations, which is human,” Debruyne instructed listeners. “Dialogue is so essential.”
Each Debruyne and Bogrand agree that the lithium provide chain can’t scale with out social acceptance, credible transparency and deep engagement with affected communities.
As Debruyne famous, “In the end, it’s about folks.”
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Securities Disclosure: I, Georgia Williams, maintain no direct funding curiosity in any firm talked about on this article.
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