Among the various global commitments to address current climate crisis, international governance bodies, such as the United Nations, have provided guidance on the need to duplicate renewable energy production and electromobility to decarbonize the global energy mix, calling this process “energy transition”. However, this implies intensifying the extraction of minerals that make the development of these technologies possible. Each region of the world plays a different rol within the supply chain of minerals that will be used in decarbonization proceses. Latin America has been identified as one of the regions with vast mineral reserves that would fuel this transicion proposal. However, in this context of mining interest there is the tendency to make invisible the populations that inhabit these territories as well as their hydrogeological systems of local, regional and global significance.

Lithium is one of the minerals that has noticeatly increased its commercial interest in terms of progress on energy decarbonization. It is in the Gran Atacama region, which encompasses areas of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, where the greatest global reserves are found. Nevertheless, for lithium to be available it requires going through a complex international supply chain, which is particularly complex since it includes mineral extraction, its refining to battery-grade, production of electrodes for batteries, production of batteries and, finally, production of electric vehicles.

This situation, of increased demand for minerals in complex global supply chains, generates warnings about the risk for the region to recreate a new cicle of extractivism, should public policies that integrate in an effective way environmental, social and territorial development standards, are not devised and implemented.

Circular economy, closely related to the energy transition process, arises as a key strategy to overcoming the logic of traditional linear economy system (take - make - consume - throw away). Its aim is to reduce pressure on the territories and common goods through the incorporation of sustainability criteria to supply chains, by promoting a more rational management of the mineral resources extracted.

However, this way of understanding circular economy, linked to minerals for energy transition, is also supported by the expansion of extractivism, especially in the Global South. This comes as a result since decarbonization options requires a huge amounts of minerals for energy storage, and these are extracted at the cost of high environmental and social impacts that threatens the resilience of the ecosystems from where they are extracted posing a risk to the populations that inhabit them.

Taking into account these limitations, a circular economy proposal, from the perspective of Latin American extraction zones and applied to transition minerals, should contribute to guarantee that changes in the energy mix towards technologies with fewer Greenhouse effect emissions (widely known as energy transition), be truly just throughout all the stages of the process. This implies avoiding the creation, expansion and/or deepening of sacrifice zones, as well as ensuring environmental restoration, guaranteeing compliance with human rights as well as reparation of those rights that have been violated. Furthermore, it should take into account the biophysical boundaries and resilience capacity of the environments.

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