The energy transition and the proliferation of power plants based on renewable energy sources have significantly heightened the demand for metals, a crucial component mined in Kazakhstan. However, in the context of climate change and global warming, the importance of water extends beyond ore extraction, emerging as a vital resource for metallurgy.

Water scarcity is already predicted in our country, and the situation can only worsen further. QazaqGreen talked to experts from the Lincoln Centre for Water Resources and Planetary Health - Professors Mark Macklin and Chris Thomas. The conversations delved into strategies for addressing the water issue and explored the potential harmonization of river and lake conservation efforts with economic development.

Q.G. Thank you for this opportunity to have an interview. My first question would be if you can explain about the Lincoln Centre for Water and Planetary Health (LCWPH) and what kind of problems, issues you're raising and maybe explain what kind of research you do in this field.

Professor Chris Thomas

Professor Chris Thomas: Planetary health is a relatively new discipline, but it brings together approaches and knowledge from very established areas of science to understand the consequence for human health and wellbeing from the many the critical issues facing the planet, such as climate change, pollution, environmental degradation, biodiversity and habitat loss, and their interacting effects. This requires a lot of different expertise and angles of view – the kind of integrated approach needed to meet UN Sustainability Development Goals Our center is at the University of Lincoln, a relatively young and growing research university in the UK, where we are able to bring together novel groupings of people and expertise. Our research center focuses on rivers, especially major rivers, globally and locally in the UK and in the many countries and regions where we work. We currently have projects in the UK, Southern Africa, Australia, and of course Central Asia, where Mark has been working for over 12 years. We work with our network of collaborators around the world, and that includes here in Kazakhstan.

Part of our mission here, and the reason why the British Embassy has invited us over to speak is to help develop the new networks required for these very complex challenges. But of course we can only tackle some of the issues – in LCWPH we focus on water, biodiversity, pollution and human health, particularly infectious diseases and the emerging threat of antimicrobial resistance in the environment, but the main thrust of our current work- and what we are going to be talking about today - is contamination of our waterways from metal mining. For the green energy transition we absolutely need these new critical minerals, so that requires a strong mining sector and that is also important for the economy. Our work has shown how metal mining in the industrial era was very damaging to the environment, but there is no need to repeat these mistakes; mining can be done now in a responsible way and we hope our work can help industry with this. We believe that Kazakhstan can be a leader in responsible mining. But there is still the problem of long-lasting pollution from previous mining, which can be severe - certainly in Europe, North America, Australia, and places that were heavily mined in the industrial era 100 years ago. There is legacy pollution too in Kazakhstan. We think it is important to understand where that is, what the implications are, and then learn from that how responsible mining can best proceed in the future. This is a big focus for our research center .

QG: I think my next question will be in line what you're talking about because I went through some statistics about the water consumption in Kazakhstan and the statistic is saying that 66% of water is consumed by agriculture, 30% by industrial facilities and only 4% by population. So if we talk about sustainability goals, security in general of the state, what kind of measures the state should apply in order to decrease the level of consumption for industrial needs of water?

Professor Chris Thomas: Clearly, the use of a limited resource like water needs to be planned carefully – and these days that means taking into account that the climate is changing very rapidly. For all sectors that means being adaptable and open to new processes and ideas. Technological development and breakthroughs offers great hope for the future so it’s important to be able to take advantage of that.

Professor Mark Macklin

Professor Mark Macklin: To come back to your original question, I think there is a nexus between water resources, between the need to transition and increasingly the need to do it as a green energy transition. The word ‘nexus’ means a series of connections or interactions among different things – which is why the Planetary Health interdisciplinary approach is so useful here. There are issues that we are going to need to understand in terms of making it a green energy transition and obviously this interacts with the way that climate change is impacting as Chris says. So we need to understand all of those elements to have responsible mining as part of this. We also need responsible uses of water, especially as it becomes a reduced and more variable resource. So it's its adaptation that we've got to move towards. But just to go back to your original point in terms of energy production, renewables are key globally and all those technologies need metals. As Chris was saying, unfortunately, because the UK was the first industrial relation, we severely damaged - and they are still damaged ‐ our rivers, our floodplains and environments from the late 18th century onwards until regulation was introduced in the 1880s. There needs to be a dramatic increase of metal production across the world, which is going to be larger than in the industrial revolution, if we are going to get to the position that we can actually escape the use of energy production from fossil fuels. Kazakhstan is exceptionally well placed in terms of critical minerals to help meet this demand, certainly within Eurasia. However, it will require water in terms of the processing and in terms of the infrastructure that is required to support the system. What we are pushing is for is what we describe as responsible mining with much reduced environmental impact, and this includes the areas impacted beyond the mine site itself. So, it is important to understand where pollution from previous mining is actually the problem. We know is that Kazakhstan has a long history of metal mining and as a consequence of that there is significant legacy contamination in a significant portion of Kazakh Rivers.

In terms of the green energy transition, we have got to make sure that the same mistakes that particularly the UK made is not repeated in Asia. Sub-Saharan Africa is another area where a lot of the critical minerals are mined and why we are also working in Tanzania and Zambia. It’s the same problem but obviously in a very different climatic, ecological and human context. What we're trying to do today is saying that there is a critical nexus between water, critical minerals and climate change. Obviously, people and ecosystems come into it as well. But unless we actually manage this process carefully, we are going to potentially repeat, but on a much larger scale, the problems that we had in our first industrial revolution. So, it's not necessarily a bad news story; it's actually a good news story because we can do things much better this time around. But we need to join things up in new ways and part of the aspiration of the Lincoln Central Water Planetary Health is to bring those things together with new, underpinning science. And then, to work with industry and government we have formed a commercial arm, which is called Walter and Planetary Health Analytics. WAPHA is run by Chris, me and our colleague Professor Pim Martins at Maastricht University in The Netherlands, who is a mathematician and social scientist. Chris is an ecologist and I'm a river scientist who works on flooding, so it’s an interdisciplinary team of world leading scientists. We all research climate change impacts in our disciplines. I've worked for 40 years in climate change and I didn't believe things would change so rapidly. When I was doing my PhD in the late 1970s, I thought it may be in my children's lifetime or my grandchildren's - but it's actually happening in my lifetime at a speed which is exceptional. I think it's really important that we position ourselves in terms of understanding those interrelationships because but otherwise we could make the same errors. We have the opportunity to do things differently.

QG: If we started to talk about the water metallurgy and mining, I would ask the next question from the other part. Due to the energy crisis in Europe especially, it seems that many countries got a deal that the next source of energy would be hydrogen. Many countries are thinking about production of hydrogen, which should be applied to the processes which are not able to be electrified, especially these processes are in metallurgy to produce metals. But the process of production of “green” hydrogen assumes the consumption of water. For our country the issue of water shortage is crucial. How it can damage the water resources, environment and different areas. So what do you think about it?

Professor Chris Thomas: The fact here is that water is very precious. It needs to go to a lot of places; it is needed to produce food, to preserve the environment, to be consumed by people, and it needs to go into other industries that are essential as well. It is certainly a challenge to think about another demand upon this supply. However, as I said earlier, I have great optimism for the potential of new technology and processes, so it is important the challenge is identified and tackled early in the development process.

Professor Mark Macklin: We had a discussion about this actually in our first meeting today with engineers from a firm which is developing green and also blue hydrogen. The point I would make from a non-technical point of view, is that in terms of resources, hydroclimate, and climate change the obvious fact is that Kazakhstan is a very big country. In terms of climate change impacts, they are very, very uneven across the country. The climate of Caspian Sea rivers, the Euro Volga are very different to the climate of Astana and the rivers which run, for example, in Northern Russia. There are very complex hydro climates and those are changing in slightly different ways. I would be very thoughtful knowing that the Caspian is an inland sea and we know what's happened to the Aral Sea and we are already seeing changes in Lake Balkash. Thus, it would have to be done carefully and with an understanding of what the climate trajectory was going to be in that catchment and water supply. That is the issue.