Critical-mineral extraction’s water crisis: How colonial licensing laws deepen global inequity
Original framing: “Bundle water safeguards into critical-mineral licences” — Nature
Indigenous water laws, such as the *Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Great Law of Peace* or the *Australian Aboriginal Water Rights Act*, treat water as a sacred trust requiring free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) from affected communities. These systems often include **restorative obligations**—e.g., the *Maori ‘kaitiakitanga’* (guardianship) model, where extraction must leave the land in a better state than found. The current proposal ignores that **90% of the world’s freshwater is managed by Indigenous or local communities**, yet they hold less than 10% of formal licensing authority. By treating water safeguards as an add-on to extraction, the framing reinforces the myth that Indigenous knowledge is ‘traditional’ rather than a superior adaptive framework for water governance.
The ‘bundled safeguards’ proposal is a **colonial governance hack**—a technical fix designed to **legitimise extraction while pre-empting resistance** by co-opting the language of environmentalism.
It obscures that **water rights are not a resource to be licensed but a commons to be defended**, a point Indigenous nations have been making for centuries, from the *Haudenosaunee’s *Great Law of Peace*** to the *Maori *Te Awa Tupua* case. The framing’s reliance on **corporate self-regulation** ignores that **mining licences are historically tools of dispossession**—whether in **19th-century California** or **21st-century Congo**—and that **water safeguards without land tenure justice are performative**. The real systemic failure isn’t enforcement gaps but the **structural coupling of extraction with state-sanctioned dispossession**, where **water is treated as a commodity** rather than a **sacred trust**. Solutions must **decolonise governance** by centring Indigenous water laws, **internalise corporate liabilities** via insurance pools, and **redistribute power** through debt-for-water swaps—all while exposing the **absurdity of framing water as an afterthought** in an era of **blue water scarcity**. The trickster lesson here is clear: **what’s missing isn’t more rules, but the courage to dismantle the extractive system itself.