LA PAZ, BOLIVIA - Chacaltaya’s days are numbered. Nestled away in the Bolivian Andes, the glacier has existed for 18,000 years, but over the last two decades most of it has melted away.
Edson Ramirez is the country’s leading glaciologist.
Sitting in his office at the University of San Andres in La Paz, he gestures to the narrow streets below. Many from his hometown and nearby El Alto depend on tropical ice fields like Chacaltaya for their water, he says.
His youthful face dulls momentarily. It’s rising temperatures, he says – that’s why it’s disappearing.
About 300km south is Salar-de-Uyuni – the world’s biggest salt-flat. Sitting inside a giant prehistoric crater, this moonscape setting is a tough place to survive. But the Uru Chipaya tribe have been here for generations, outlasting the Incan empire and the Spanish conquest.
Now they face extinction.
Chief Felix Quispe says that the river that sustained his people for so long, the Lauca, has been reduced to a trickle.
“Over here used to be all water,” he says, pointing across a dusty plain. “There were ducks, crabs and reeds growing in the water. I remember that. What are we going to do? We are water people.”
Landlocked and poor, the largely indigenous nation is a snapshot of the effects of climate change on developing regions everywhere. With the largest rich-poor divide in South America, a harsh environment, and an economy based on market-sensitive exports like tin, natural gas and soybeans; the Andean nation is like the canary in the coalmine.
Both socioeconomically and ecologically, right now the country’s reeling from the impacts of climate change – and the canary’s twittering us a warning we can’t ignore.
Unpredictable weather and lower rainfall destroy crops, and clear-cutting triggers landslides and massive flooding. Meanwhile forest fires scorch lowland areas, as mosquito-borne diseases spread to areas where they never existed before.
With reduced harvests, trips to the market are less profitable. Struggling to make ends meet, parents get their kids to help out on the farm, instead of sending them to school. With no formal education, their futures are bleak – for the most part they end up trapped in a poverty cycle that just goes round and round.
Chacaltaya ten years ago covered with snow.
A recent Oxfam report on the impacts of climate change in Bolivia says that more and more people are becoming destitute. With few resources and a weak economy, can developing regions like this cope with these unprecedented climactic shifts?
The answer is no.
Climate change and other urgent areas like education, human rights and food are as tightly inter-woven as the threads of a snug Alpaca-wool poncho.
There’s no picking apart these issues.
So if aid agencies like ActionAid focus on climate change they will actually be tackling other clearly pressing development issues too. And if world leaders, NGOs and other key players don’t take action now, an already dire situation will become catastrophic.
It’s not just Bolivia. This is going down big time worldwide, from Togo to Tuvalu.
A few months back Tropical Storm Ketsana ripped across the Philippines archipelago, killing more than 277 and displacing about 2 million others. News video shows rivers engulfing downtown Manila; locals desperately clutching to rafts of refuse as they sweep past buildings and floating cars. Emergency services were stretched to breaking point in the aftermath of the heaviest downpour in 40 years.
Over the last few years tropical storms like Hurricane Katrina, Andrew and Ike ripped through the Caribbean and southern US killing many and costing more than $100 billion damage. Cyclone Nargis lashed Burma last year, killing at least 146,000 people, and razing much of the land, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless and without access to clean water or basic facilities.
Southeast Asia has been battered by these kinds of weather systems this year, and so too has their fragile economies. Wildfires ravage parts of Australia and the US. Droughts parch Africa and many other places. Rising sea levels are submerging small islands and delta-regions. Tundra is disappearing across the far North.
Sounds like a blockbuster disaster movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal or Will Smith– but this is for real.
It’s impossible to accurately forecast the cost of climate change if it continues unabated, but former World Bank chief economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, reckons that it could cut up to 20% of the world’s wealth by the end of the century. This dwarfs the massive losses suffered from the recent financial crisis, but like the meltdown it will hit the poorest the hardest.
If global temperatures rise by 2 degrees, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPCC) predicts that worldwide an extra 400 million could be exposed to malaria, 600 million could be affected by malnutrition, and 1.8 billion could be living without enough water. Hundreds of millions will lose their homes and land to sea-level rise, and damage from tropical storms and hurricanes will increase as they get fiercer and more frequent.
Countless more will be dragged into poverty – sidelined from the mainstream economy.
With Copenhagen fast approaching, most negotiators agree that climate financing must be at the centre of any fair and comprehensive climate treaty, but they squabble over who will pay. Climate financing means that wealthier nations will help foot the bill so poorer regions can adapt to climate change and switch over to cleaner technology.
At a recent forum in the Maldives, nations that are most threatened by global warming issued a declaration of their concerns and demands.
The words are powerful – especially considering some of the signatory-states might not exist by the end of this century. It argues that advanced economies have a moral duty to bankroll the bulk of climate financing, as they’ve been pumping out greenhouse gases since steam trains started rattling around the English countryside, in the early 1800s.
Like governments, aid agencies also must zero in on global warming as a priority, even though there are so many other critical issues to deal with. Besides, these two fronts of the development world overlap on so many different levels. Investing in a clean future means more jobs, less pollution, and a more sustainable global economy – one that isn’t based on exploiting the resources and cheap labour force of poor regions to feed the insatiable appetite of the rich.
Back in La Paz, Ramirez pulls on his baseball cap and shakes his head. He says that if it keeps getting hotter he’ll have no job and the city’s residents will have no water.
And that’s the least of our problems…