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Alliance for Andean Wetlands

The Alliance for Andean Wetlands brings together various socio-environmental organizations with the aim of promoting the protection and conservation of Andean wetlands, as well as the territories of the local, peasant and indigenous communities that depend on them in Latin America, especially in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.

It is essential to strengthen the water-territory-energy-life link in order to propose a just energy transition. Andean salt flats, lakes and lagoons are complex and fragile life systems. The communities and peoples that inhabit them guard an ancestral wisdom that maintains the balance in the ecosystem.

Claudia Velarde, Co-director of AIDA's Ecosystem Program

About the Alliance

Our approach

  • The value of these ecosystems as a refuge of unique biodiversity, water reserves for the future and climate regulators.
  • Respect for regional ways of living, culture and economies, from a perspective of protecting human rights, including the right to a healthy environment, and the rights of nature.
  • Access to environmental justice in a context of corporate energy transition, framed in multidimensional crises such as the global economy, the climate crisis, forced migrations and food insecurity, among others.

Our values and principles

  • We promote a just, participatory and popular socio-ecological transition with a long-term vision.
  • We seek to guarantee the participation of communities and their access to complete, truthful and transparent information.
  • We promote access to environmental and climate justice for local and indigenous communities and territorial defenders.

Lithium mining in wetlands implies serious alterations in their availability for biodiversity and people, and for the functioning of ecosystems as a whole.

Pía Marchegiani, Deputy Executive Director of the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN), Argentina.

How do we do it?

Through different pedagogical, legal, research, advocacy, communication and mobilization strategies, collectively and in dialogue with communities and organizations.

We coordinate these actions through working groups, meetings and periodic virtual workshops where we share progress, strategies, challenges and lessons learned among organizations from different countries.

Our alliance works on the basis of agreements and common points, respecting the diversity of opinions and seeking to resolve differences through dialogue and consensus.

The members of the Alliance avoid intervening in territorial conflicts and, if decisions are necessary, they are worked on in coordination bodies as countries and as a region. We recognize and respect the autonomy of the communities involved, avoiding assuming representative roles or adopting paternalistic attitudes that could replicate colonial dynamics.

What we do not do?

  • We do not provide third parties with contact information of members of communities, organizations, environmental defenders or people living in the affected territories without their prior consent.
  •  We do not facilitate corporate processes of social participation and certification of extractive projects that affect Andean salt flats and wetlands (e.g. “Responsible Mining”).

An alliance with a gender perspective

We incorporate a gender perspective in the development of the Alliance's activities because we recognize the differentiated impacts of the climate crisis on women, girls, sexual dissidents and other vulnerable groups.

Advocating for a just and popular energy transition implies considering not only the need to decarbonize, but also ensuring the preservation of biodiversity and the livelihoods of peoples and communities.

Ramón Balcázar, director of the Tantí Foundation, Chile.

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