Water stewardship

In high-altitude Andean settings, water is the resource on which agriculture, pasture and settlement depend, and it is the resource around which almost every community concern about mining is organised. It is also the subject on which a mining activity is most visibly accountable, because a change in the quantity or quality of water downstream is observable by the people affected without any technical assistance.

We therefore treat water as a shared resource rather than as an input we buy. What we take, what we return and what condition we return it in are matters on which the people downstream have a legitimate interest, and we design our arrangements so that interest can be satisfied with evidence.

Water abstraction and discharge require authorisation in Peru, administered by the Autoridad Nacional del Agua, and the conditions attached to an authorisation bind the activity, with oversight and enforcement exercised by the Organismo de Evaluacion y Fiscalizacion Ambiental. The environmental instrument approved for an exploration activity carries its own water commitments, including monitoring.

We discuss water monitoring results through our community engagement arrangements, and we handle a concern raised about water through the grievance mechanism established for the activity: logged, investigated for cause, mitigated where a cause is established, and the outcome communicated to the person who raised it. Where a community wishes to observe or participate in monitoring, we treat that as a reasonable request rather than an intrusion, because evidence a community has seen collected is evidence it can rely on.

Water availability in the Andes is affected by glacial retreat and by changes in the seasonal distribution of precipitation. We therefore assess water both as an environmental subject and as a chronic physical climate exposure, and the assessments inform one another rather than proceeding separately. Water treatment, pumping and recirculation are also energy loads, and we assess their energy consequence as part of the same decision.

Where an activity generates them, withdrawal, consumption, discharge and recycling volumes are published. We monitor under the commitments carried by the applicable environmental instrument and the water authorisations, and we maintain the records so that reporting rests on a consistent basis.