Retreating ice (part 2)

As revealed in part 1 of this news story, Peru's new President has taken office at a time when the country's media and government officials are trying to understand the causes and implications of 40 years of glacial ice loss. The pattern is clear and, in the last decade, some of Peru's glaciers are retreating by over 20m a year.

There are several obvious social and economic impacts already perceivable from this environmental shift. It hardly ever rains on Peru's coast which is dependent on glacial outflows for all-year-round water supply to the country's major cities and massive irrigated agricultural areas in the coastal desert. Up in the mountains, particularly in the Cordillera Blanca (see part 1), glaciers have been one of the major attractions. Their loss is already reducing numbers of visitors. As the glaciers melt, however slowly, they also transform into a deadly risk for locals and visitors alike in terms of increased likelihood of glacial landslides. Back in 1970, a section of Peru's highest glacial peak - Huascaran - slid off the mountain, down into the valley, during a major earthquake, wiping out a whole town and killing over 70,000 people.

Peru's government officials - from the Ministry of Environment to the National Water Authority - see global warming from human activities and energy use as the main underlying cause of glacial retreat. There are other signs of climate change in Peru's Amazon, on the opposite side of the Andes to the coastal desert. Here the rainy season is being felt more intensely and the dry season is manifesting unprecedented drought levels over the last 10 years. Despite this, the Peruvian government - supported by Brazilian companies - is planning several socially, legally and environmentally controversial mega-dam projects to generate hydro electric power from its Amazon headwaters. For a developing country like Peru, the loss of fresh water is a big enough problem by itself; but when it is so intertwined with other serious national and international concerns, the picture worsens.

Across the globe, deforestation is responsible for almost 20% of man-made green house gas emissions. In Peru, most of their emissions come from the agro-forestry sector and land-use changes. Ironically, one of the main techniques being experimented with in the Cordillera Blanca, to minimise or slow down glacial melting, is the piling of sawdust and chippings from Amazonian sawmills onto the surface of glacial ice. The experiment has demonstrated positive results - saving between 4m and 5m of ice loss a year. However, if logging is Peru's major contribution to climate change, this seems like a bit of a short-term solution. Other techniques for insulating the glaciers might eventually be discovered and applied. This could eke out Peru's water resource for longer, but still would not reverse the overall effect of a warming climate.

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