Bolivia sans glaciers?

When the tap across from her mud-walled home dried up in September, Celia Cruz stopped making soups and scaled back washing for her family of five. She began daily pilgrimages to better-off neighbourhoods, hoping to find water there.
Though she has lived here for a decade and her husband, a construction worker, makes a decent wage, money cannot buy water.

“I’m thinking of moving back to the countryside; what else can I do?” said Cruz, 33, wearing traditional braids and a long-tiered skirt as she surveyed a courtyard dotted with piglets, bags of potatoes and an ancient red Datsun. “Two years ago, this was never a problem. But if there’s no water, you can’t live.”

The glaciers that have long provided water and electricity to this part of Bolivia are melting and disappearing, victims of global warming, most scientists say.

If the water problems are not solved, El Alto, a poor sister city of La Paz, could perhaps be the first large urban casualty of climate change. A World Bank report concluded last year that climate change would eliminate many glaciers in the Andes within 20 years, threatening the existence of nearly 100 million people.

An angry voice
With its recent climate-induced catastrophes, Bolivia has become an angry voice for poor nations, demanding that any financing be paid out in full and rapidly.

“We have a big problem, and even money won’t completely solve it,” said Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations. “What do you do when your glacier disappears or your island is under water?” Scientists say that money and engineering could solve La Paz-El Alto’s water problems, with projects including a well-designed reservoir. The glaciers that ring the cities have essentially provided natural low-maintenance storage, collecting water in the short rainy season and releasing it for water and electricity in the long dry one. With warmer temperatures and changing rainfall, they no longer do so.

“The effects are appearing much more rapidly than we can respond to them, and a reservoir takes five to seven years to build: I’m not sure we have that long,” said Edson Ramirez, a Bolivian glaciologist who has documented and projected the glaciers’ retreat for two decades.

Lately, that retreat has outpaced his wildest imaginings. He had predicted that one glacier, Chacaltaya, would last until 2020. It disappeared this year. In 2006, he said that El Alto’s water demand would outstrip supply by 2009. It happened.

Populations at the brink
“These are populations at the brink of surviving anyway, and then you have the extra stress of climate change and you have huge social problems,” said Dirk Hoffmann, head of the climate change programme at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres in La Paz. “What’s at stake is conflict - you wouldn’t talk about civil war exactly. But it will be unrest.” Glaciers are part of the majestic landscape here, visible from almost everywhere in the neighbouring cities of La Paz and El Alto, each with one million people. Their disappearance is as startling to Bolivians as viewing Lower Manhattan without the twin towers is to New Yorkers.

Chacaltaya, at 17,500 feet, was home to the world’s highest ski area from 1939 until 2005, when the glacier retreated beyond the slopes. The lodge, still stocked with rental equipment and decorated with murals of skiers, sits mostly abandoned.
Though all glaciers expand and retreat over time, recent research has found that small, relatively low-altitude glaciers, like those in Bolivia, are particularly vulnerable to warming temperatures, a phenomenon that glaciologists compare to the fate of small ice cubes in water.

‘Our great protector’
In Khapi, a village two hours’ drive from La Paz, people regard Illimani glacier as “our God, our great protector,” said Mario Ariquipa Laso, 55, a wizened farmer who grows potatoes and corn on sheer slopes in the shadow of the glacier. Ten years ago, it provided a steady, gentle stream during the dry months to keep crops watered. But today, with Illimani in retreat, water “just pours” off the glacier, a yellowish mix.
In October, La Paz officials began closing the car washes on Avenida Kollasuyo, relenting only when some rain came in late November. “This was the first time we’ve been told there was not enough water for us to operate,” said Omar Mamaru, 25, owner of Auto-Stop, in thick orange gloves and a windbreaker, as he scrubbed a blue SUV.
In the last few years, Bolivian lives have also been buffeted by an almost biblical array of extreme weather events, many of which scientists believe are probably linked to climate change, though this is currently difficult to prove because poor countries like Bolivia have little long-term scientific data. This year brought scorching temperatures and sun so intense that indigenous mothers like Cruz rue the burns on their children's dark skin. A drought killed 7,000 farm animals and sickened nearly 100,000.

Severe storms
Severe storms normally associated with El Nino periods, every seventh year, now occur regularly. Warmer temperatures mean new crop pests, crickets and worms, as well as the spread of diseases like malaria and dengue fever.

On a recent morning in Huaricana, a village an hour from La Paz, people used rocks and timber to repair a road bisected by a 40-foot-wide river of mud delivered by a potent storm. A vendor sold ice cream to children watching the now-familiar scene.
“This has only been happening the last three years,” said Oswaldo Vargas, 55, as he towed a public bus across the mud with his Fiat tractor.

Developed countries agree that they have an obligation to help relieve such stresses, but many remain hesitant to release funds, in part because poor countries have few concrete plans to address climate problems. The effects of climate changes have not yet been analysed or quantified by Epsas, the water company, for example.
“Right now we’re living on additional glacier melt that won’t be here in a few years,” said Hoffmann, of the climate change programme. “Isn’t that ironic?”