All Along The Andes, Mountain Glaciers In Full Retreat, Water Supplies In Trouble

[hatrack]

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4,698m (15,420ft) Mount Cayambe, Ecuador: We are dead on the equator but the wind whips snow from the glaciers and icefields on Ecuador's third highest mountain. The 5,897m (19,350ft) peak is shrouded in cloud but the ice, which used to stretch many kilometres down the mountain, has retreated 600m (2,000ft) up the mountain in 30 years. "Ecuador has nearly lost one third of its ice," says the glaciologist Bolivar Caceres, the head of the government's glacier and meteorology unit. "The speed has been incredible. It started in the 1980s and is still accelerating. The glaciers have all retreated miles. Cayambe has lost 40% of its ice mass, possibly 10% in just the last decade." His predictions, however, are based on a 1°C rise in temperatures in the next 80 years, which other glaciologists say could be too conservative.

4,100m (13,450ft) Pampa Corral, near Cusco, Peru: The farmer Julio Hanneco grows 215 varieties of potatoes in his highland village. "I live close to two glaciers. They used to give us light in the night and water. I would only have to walk a few metres and I could touch one. Now they have gone. It takes a whole day to get close to one. There have been so many changes in the climate and I don't understand what is happening. The seasons used to be certain and we would know when to plant crops. I feel disoriented. I fear soon we will have no water. If that happens it would be the end of the world for us."

4,058m (13,313ft) La Paz, Bolivia: New peer-reviewed, US-government funded research suggests that Bolivia and Peru face catastrophic food and water shortages if temperatures rise as predicted. Researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), found that Lake Titicaca had twice shrunk 85% following temperature rises only 2-3°C higher than now. "The implications would be profound for over two million people," says NSF's Paul Filmer. In a separate analysis, the cost of climate change to Bolivia, South America's poorest country, could be over 7% of its GDP by 2025 – almost as much as the country's combined spending on health and education.

3,900m (12,795) The Paramo, Ecuador: Highland communities here are having to adapt fast to the changes. "There is much less rain than before and the land has been overused in the past by big cattle ranches. We need to conserve everything. We have banned cattle and restored 100km of old waterways. It has been a huge community effort but we have increased the amount of water available by 10%," says Humberto Cholango, from the village of More on the flanks of Mount Cayambe. The retreat of the glaciers also affects the electricity supplies of major cities such as La Paz and El Alto in Bolivia which depend on hydro power, says Bolivar Caceres. In Ecuador, where only 3% of the water supplies come directly from glaciers, 15% of the water is held in the boggy pasturelands called the Paramo. If this is allowed to dry up, he says, then cities will have less.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/26/climate-change-andes-amazon

[necso]

1. A (too) little, quick context:

"The system is extraordinary both for its complexity and its stability—and biodiversity is at its heart. Farmers in the Andes grow as many as 3,000 different kinds of potatoes, and hundreds of types of other crops. Diversity is not just a source of variety, or testimony to the staggering range of microclimates and ecological zones—it's also a proven tool against diseases, pests and other scourges."

(http://homelands.org/worlds/potatoes.html)

Using well these "microclimates and ecological zones" involves considerable closeness to, understanding of the natural world (soils, weather, climate, and natural patterns more generally): the sort of (expert) knowledge that often has been built up over generations; and a type of earthly and earthy wisdom that I have great respect for.