KlimRess – Impacts of climate change on mining, related environmental risks and raw material supply: case studies on copper and lithium mining in Chile

The following case study is one of five country case studies carried out as part of the project ‘Impacts of climate change on the environmental criticality of Germany’s raw material demand‘ (KlimRess), commissioned by the German Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA). The project team comprised adelphi, ifeu Heidelberg and the Sustainable Minerals Institute of the University of Queensland. The aim of the project was to assess how climate change potentially affects the environmental risks of mining and raw material supply chains. This case study analyses BHP Billiton’s Escondida copper mining operations and SQM’s Salar de Atacama lithium mine in Chile.