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CLIMATE CHANGE: Bearing Witness with Painful Firsthand Knowledge

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Dec 13 2004 (IPS) - For Penina Moce, who lives on Kabara, one of the smallest of the Fiji islands, climate change is anything but an abstract concept. She sees its effects every day, as the Pacific Ocean eats away at the beaches of her village.

Norbu Sherpa, who lives in the Himalayan mountains in Nepal, also began suffering the consequences of global warming long before the first international climate change conference.

Nineteen years ago, a huge mass of water descended from a melting glacier up in the mountains, two kilometres from his village, which is near Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain peak.

Dikes that had been put in place to prevent destruction from normal spring thaws were overwhelmed, and the flood wiped away trees, livestock and entire houses, including Sherpa’s. He and his family survived because the flash flood occurred during the daytime and they were not at home.

Osvaldo Bonino lives in a small town in Argentina, and also knows firsthand that climate change is all too real, and that many of the changes are irreversible.

Bonino comes from Aarón Castellanos in the northeastern province of Santa Fe, a traditional agricultural community where many local farmers were forced to turn to fishing instead after the nearby lake, La Picasa, expanded from 3,000 to 50,000 hectares in just a short time, due to the increase in rainfall.

None of the three had ever participated in an international gathering like the 10th session of the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-10), in which delegates are meeting Dec. 6-17 in Buenos Aires to discuss ways to reduce greenhouse gases, which trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere, causing global warming.

Along with other local representatives of communities affected by climate change, Moce, Sherpa and Bonino were invited to the conference by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which just launched a "Climate Witnesses" campaign.

Moce, who is married and has five children, earns a livelihood with her husband fishing and making crafts. In Kabara, as on nearby islands, people work hard to eke out a living, and must collect rainwater, for example, to obtain drinking water.

"When I was a girl, we harvested many things from the ocean and the land, but not any more," she told IPS.

"The sea is eating up our beaches and is reaching closer and closer to our houses," said Moce, who added that the island might look like a tropical paradise, but is actually a very difficult place to live.

"The interior is very rocky, and we can only build our houses along the coast," which means they are endangered by the rising sea level, she explained.

The local residents are trying to win the battle against the sea by planting vegetation all along the shoreline in order to form a barrier against the waves, which are getting stronger and stronger.

But there is little they can do. "Any money that flows into Fiji stays on the big islands," an activist with the Fundación de Vida Silvestre Argentina (Argentine Wildlife Foundation), which is taking part in the "Climate Witnesses" campaign, told IPS.

Sherpa, meanwhile, came to Argentina from Khumbu, the region of Nepal most affected by the melting of glaciers and the resultant flooding when lakes overflow.

Scientific researchers warn that phenomena like the melting of glaciers, the rising sea level, heavy rainfall and flooding will become more and more intense if global warming – which is blamed on the emissions of greenhouse gases released by the burning of oil, natural gas and coal – continues.

For the past 15 years, Sherpa has been working as a mountain guide, and on his expeditions he has observed how the glaciers are melting and the lakes are growing. "It is difficult to live in the mountains, but it is much worse if we also have to face the threat of floods, like the one we already suffered," he commented to IPS.

In his presentation at the conference, Sherpa said he came from the mountains, and did not normally have access to an international meeting like the one in Buenos Aires, so he wanted to take advantage of his trip to urge people to take climate change very seriously because it affects the lives of people all around the world, from Buenos Aires to the Himalayas.

In Argentina, La Picasa lake used to vary in size between 3,000 and 10,000 hectares, depending on the rainfall. But in 2001, annual rainfall totalled 1,200 millimetres (compared to an average of 800), and the lake grew to 50,000 hectares, before shrinking again to 30,000. The national highway that runs by the village and the railroad tracks have been flooded since the first heavy rains, in 1998.

The village of Aarón Castellanos used to be a way station along the highway and railroad that link Buenos Aires with western Argentina and Chile.

"I have a photo of the last train that made the trip. You can see it riding through a sea of water," said Bonino.

Around 200 small, medium and large farmers and stockbreeders continue to demand indemnification for the land that they lost to the flooding, as well as the creation of new infrastructure to keep the situation from getting any worse.

But they have achieved very little. And Bonino, a local shopkeeper, has felt the impact, because the population of the village has shrunk from 600 to 300.

His sister’s family used to live two kilometres from the lake, and his brother-in-law worked on a nearby farm that belonged to a large landowner. But in 2001 the shore of the lake reached their house.

Nevertheless, for a long time they resisted making the inevitable move. "For months, my brother-in-law would carry his two children and wade through waist-deep water 100 metres to the road, so the kids could go to school," he told IPS.

The family and other local residents tried to make a living by fishing, but the lake’s fish stocks were soon over-exploited, because people came in from other provinces to fish, as well.

It took a while for the people of Aarón Castellanos to come to grips with the fact that the expansion of the lake was irreversible, and that it was connected to human activity.

"Climate change seems like something that will happen in the future, but it’s not. Unfortunately, you only understand that when a tragedy occurs, like the one that happened to us," said Bonino.