An armed forces helicopter flies over the area of La Corona, which will be covered by a plastic blanket, on the Humboldt Peak in the Andes. It is the last glacier in Venezuela and will possibly disappear in less than two years. CREDIT: Harrison Ruiz / Minec

By Humberto Márquez
MÉRIDA, Venezuela, Mar 4 2024 (IPS)

Venezuela has undertaken the task of covering the remains of its last glacier, La Corona, on Humboldt Peak at 4,900 meters above sea level in the Andes mountains in the southwest of the country, with plastic “blankets” to slow the inevitable end of this icy patch of its mountain landscape and source of legends.

“We are not going to change the rhythm of nature, but we’re trying to curb the loss of the strip of glacier that we have left, for research and contributions that can be useful for other Andean countries where glaciers are also receding,” Toro Belisario, director of the Ministry of Ecosocialism (Minec) in the southwestern Andean state of Mérida, told IPS."A couple of dying hectares is all that remains of the nearly 1,000 hectares of glaciers that Venezuela had in the Sierra Nevada de Mérida at the beginning of the 20th century. They are the first victims of global warming." -- Julio César Centeno

The 1.8-hectare remains of the glacier will be covered with 80-meter-long polypropylene geotextile “blankets” brought from Italy in 35 rolls weighing 80 kilos each, which will be lifted by armed forces helicopters to the camp on the Humboldt Peak.

Some academics are opposed to the project, claiming that it has not been properly studied and that it is a vain effort to resist climate change and poses environmental risks for mountain species and rural and urban communities that could be polluted by plastic waste.

Belisario acknowledged that at the rate at which the glacier is retreating, one hectare per year, it has little life left, under the burden of climate change and the impact of the El Niño weather phenomenon blowing warm winds over the Pacific Ocean that alter the temperature in the region.

On the other hand, he defended the usefulness of the data that the initiative and its monitoring can provide month after month, for Venezuela and neighbors such as Peru, where numerous communities depend on glaciers as a source of water.

Perpetual snow disappeared decades ago from Bolívar Peak, Venezuela’s highest mountain at 4978 meters above sea level. Other glaciers in the Venezuelan Andes also melted during the 20th century. CREDIT: JC Centeno Chair

Environmental expert Julio César Centeno, a professor at the University of the Andes (ULA) in Mérida, told IPS that “the most that can be expected from the initiative is to prolong for a couple more years the final ordeal of the tiny, dying portion of the glacier that remains.”

Centeno and other ULA researchers warned in a press release that “it could cause environmental and ecological damage to the glacier and surrounding areas of the Andes highlands, as well as potentially affecting neighboring populations, due to air and water pollution from micro and nano plastics.”

The criticism asserts that Minec has failed to comply with current legislation, in terms of broad and informed consultation with local communities, presentation of an environmental impact study available to the public, and working together with concerned institutions, such as the university.

A century of retreat

“A couple of dying hectares is all that remains of the nearly 1,000 hectares of glaciers that Venezuela had in the Sierra Nevada de Mérida at the beginning of the 20th century. They are the first victims of global warming,” Centeno said.

This mountain range is in the center of the Venezuelan Andes – a 450 kilometer mountainous strip – with “perpetual snow” on its high peaks, Bolivar – 4978 meters above sea level, the highest in the country – La Concha, Toro, Humboldt and Bonpland.

La Corona glacier, between the Humboldt and Bonpland peaks, once covered 400 hectares, and even hosted a national ski championship. It has lost more than 99 percent of its original size, largely due to global warming. CREDIT: JC Centeno Chair

All of them have shrunk over the years, but in 1956 a national ski championship was held in the mountains. However, at the end of the last century only the La Corona glacier remained, on the Humboldt Peak, which with 400 hectares had also covered part of the Bonpland mountain, before losing 99.7 percent of its original extension.

Centeno explained that in countries such as Germany, Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland, glaciers are being covered with plastic blankets to reflect solar radiation and reduce energy absorption, but only during the summer months and especially in ski resorts. The costs are charged to the users.

There are also cases in Chile, China and Russia, and in most cases the glaciers to be covered are not only in latitudes far from the tropics but at lower altitudes than in Mérida, with more exposure to wind, sun and rain, which provide harsher conditions for the geotextile coverings.

This led ULA experts to warn of greater risks of deterioration of the tarps, and ruptures or tears leading to the spread of micro and nano plastics that the air and water would carry to agricultural and urban communities, such as the city of Mérida at the foot of the Sierra, with a population of around 300,000 people.

View of the city of Mérida, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. For centuries the regional capital has had an intense mythical, utilitarian and artistic link with its mountains. CREDIT: Espasa Mérida

Five white eagles

Since its foundation in 1558, the city has had a close relationship with its snow-capped mountains, ranging from enraptured contemplation to the utilitarian source of income provided by the highest cable car in the world, reaching from the city to 4765 meters above sea level in the Sierra.

In literature, the best-known reference is “The Five White Eagles”, which dates back to 1895, in which the humanist Tulio Febres Cordero (1860-1938) wrote down a legend of the Mirripuyes Indians, one of the groups that lived in the area when the Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century.

The legend has it that five huge white eagles with silver wings flew over the mountains and Caribay, the first woman, daughter of the sun and the moon, fell in love with them and wanted the birds’ feathers to adorn her head.

Caribay ran along the ridges chasing the shadows of the birds but, when she was about to reach them, the eagles dug their talons into the cliffs and turned to stone, forming the five masses of ice that crowned the Sierra.

Since then, according to the legend, the occasional snowfalls are simply the awakening of the eagles, and the whistling of the wind in the highlands is an echo of the sad, monotonous song of Caribay as she fails to reach her silver trophy.

The governor of the state of Mérida, Jehyson Guzmán (R) receives the rolls of polystyrene, purchased in Italy, with which the La Corona glacier will be partially covered. Environmental academics are alert to the risk of eventual deterioration becoming a source of plastic pollution. CREDIT: Harrison Ruiz / Minec

Political presence

In justifying the plastic blanket project, Belisario said that “because of what this legend represents for the cosmovision of people from Mérida, we must not allow the glacier to disappear without contributing what we can to its study, and to the mitigation and adaptation to climate change.”

Centeno lamented that the eagles “no longer flap their wings, and their feathers no longer glitter. We all believed that because of their grandeur they were indestructible. They were swallowed by human indifference.”

In conversation with IPS, Ana Medina, a high school teacher in Mérida, and Yajaira Méndez, a shopkeeper in the municipal market, agreed that at home young people “must have once studied the legend of the white eagles” but that they are hardly aware of the end of the glacier.

“The people of Mérida love their mountains but have no information, and the glacier covering is not a topic that is talked about on a daily basis,” Euro Lobo, a veteran journalist in the city, told IPS.

Centeno said there may be political interest, in this year in which the country will hold a presidential election and it is expected that the current President Nicolás Maduro will seek reelection for a third six-year term.

“Perhaps the government wants to show that it is interested in saving as much as possible of the jewel that represents the last glacier for the city and the country,” said Centeno.

This monument to the Five White Eagles is on the outskirts of the city of Mérida. A legend written down in the late 19th century by writer Tulio Febres Cordero is a cultural icon. CREDIT: Samuel Hurtado / IAM Venezuela

Operation Protection

The governor of the state of Mérida, Jehyson Guzmán, of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, and General Ruben Belzares, the area’s military chief, announced on Feb. 21 that the new phase of the “Operation Protection of the Humboldt Peak Glacier” began.

“This is about rescuing the last glacier in Venezuela, the last stretch of ice that nature donated in its landscapes to the Mérida territory. We are involved in the struggle to rescue, preserve and maintain it as far as possible,” said Belzares.

He pointed out that a helicopter has been prepared to transport material and equipment, and reconnaissance flights have been carried out near the summit.

Guzmán said that the first camp has been set up and its 26 members are ready to begin work as soon as weather conditions permit, since there was unusual snowfall for the end of February.

Since December the region has had high temperatures, “generating higher pressure on the glacier. That is why the deployment is important, because at this accelerated rate of heat at the end of the year we may not have any glacier left,” said Guzmán.

He reported that in the Sierra Nevada all types of burning and logging have been prohibited, as well as climbing with spiked shoes.

He also specified that the geotextile blankets will not be placed directly on the entire glacier, but in the surrounding areas where the ice sheet is weakening, where melting has been the most accelerated.

The final flapping of the wings of the last of the eagles will occur under a polystyrene blanket.

A display of what the harvest of fruit and vegetables would be like without the water from the glaciers, in the Jan. 23, 2015 Fair Without Glaciers organised by Greenpeace in Santiago’s Plaza de la Constitución. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Feb 4 2015 (IPS)

Chile’s more than 3,000 glaciers are one of the largest reserves of freshwater in South America. But they are under constant threat by the mining industry and major infrastructure projects, environmentalists and experts warn.

The lack of legislation to protect them allowed the global environmental watchdog Greenpeace to create the Glacier Republic in March 2014 – a virtual country created on 23,000 sq km of glaciers in the Chilean Andes, which already has over 165,000 citizens and 40 embassies spread around the world.

“The Glacier Republic emerged in response to a need, because the glaciers in this country aren’t protected,” the executive director of Greenpeace Chile, Matías Asún, told Tierramérica.

A glacier is a huge mass of ice and snow that forms where snow in the wintertime gathers faster than it melts in the summer and flows slowly over an area of land. Most of the world’s freshwater — 69 percent — is locked away in glaciers and ice caps.

“These are strategic reserves of water that contribute in a significant manner during periods of drought and are found not only in the high mountains but also in the south of the country,” Asún explained.

“Many glaciers have been buried and conserve important reserves of water,” he added. “These supply water to the river basins, and not only the most basic human activities but also agriculture and the economy of the country depend on the basins.”

Chile, a mining country whose main source of wealth is copper, has 82 percent of South America’s glaciers, according to Greenpeace. However, most of them have visibly retreated due to the impact of climate change and large-scale mining activities.

Addressing the Chilean legislature in 2014, glaciologist Alexander Brenning, from the University of Waterloo, Ontario said the magnitude of interventions on glaciers in Chile was unparalleled in the world, and urged that the cumulative effects be assessed.

“The experts are emphatic: Chile has one of the worst records in the world in terms of destruction of glaciers,” Asún said. “This is the sad situation that forced us to found the Glacier Republic.”

“Because the glaciers were in no man’s land, we used that legal vacuum to found the Glacier Republic. We took possession of the entire surface area of glaciers in Chile and declared ourselves an independent republic,” he added.

The Glacier Republic, created as an awareness-raising campaign, was founded on the basis of the Convention on Rights and Duties of States, better known as the Montevideo Convention after the city where it was signed in 1933. The first article of the convention establishes four requisites for declaring the creation of a state: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

The aim of the Glacier Republic is to push for what the citizens describe as a “five-star” law on glaciers, which would guarantee the total protection of Chile’s glaciers.

The El Morado glacier in the Andes mountains in central Chile. Credit: Orlando Ruz/IPS

The activists want protection of the glaciers as a national asset for public use to be introduced in the constitution.

They also argue that the law should establish that “the glaciers represent strategic reserves of water in a solid state,” and that it should include a legal definition of glaciers and descriptions of the different kinds of glaciers and their ecosystems, and specify what kinds of activities are permitted and prohibited in each ecosystem.

In addition, the idea is to establish in the law a grace period and specific timeframe for activities currently carried out in protected or potentially protected areas to adapt to the new law.

In May 2014, lawmakers from the self-described “glacier caucus”, which includes the former student leader and current Communist legislator Camila Vallejo, introduced a draft law in Congress to create a legal framework to protect the country’s glaciers.

The current legislation allows activities like mining or the construction of infrastructure to affect a glacier, if the impact is spelled out in the environmental impact assessment and compensated for in some way.

In August, Congress agreed to try to move towards passage of a new law. But the draft law, which has drawn criticism from different sides, has not yet been approved.

Chilean glaciologist Cedomir Marangunic, who works with different technologies to save and create new glaciers, told Tierramérica that he believes certain well-regulated activities, such as tourism or development projects, can be allowed in the areas of the glaciers, unless prohibiting all human activity is indispensable for the survival of a specific glacier.

But he said glaciers, especially the ones located on privately owned territory, should be in the public domain by law.

Marangunic, a geologist at the University of Chile with a PhD in glaciology from Ohio State University in the U.S., said that although “some mining” hurts glaciers, “the pollution caused by large cities like Santiago or the smoke from the burning of grasslands and forests” also damage them.

But for the Diaguita Community of Huasco Valley in the arid northern region of Atacama, where the Canadian company Barrick Gold’s Pascua Lama gold and silver mine is located, there is no room for doubt.

“Glaciers are the reservoirs of water that we have had for thousands of years. And today, in times of drought, it is the glaciers that keep us alive and supplied with water,” the indigenous community’s spokesman, Sebastián Cruz, told Tierramérica.

Huasco Valley, in the Atacama desert, the driest in the world, runs across the Andes mountains to the sea and is fed by water from the glaciers, added the representative of the Diaguita native community, who live in that vulnerable ecosystem.

Far from living up to the commitment expressed in the environmental impact study, the Pascua Lama gold mine has destroyed “nearly 99 percent of the Esperanza glacier and the Toro 1 and 2 glaciers,” Cruz said.

The Diaguita community argues that a new law on glaciers must guarantee protection for certain conservation areas and must ban any extractive or mining activities in the glaciers and the surrounding landscape.

Socialist President Michelle Bachelet promised to protect the glaciers, in a May 2014 speech to the nation. But since then she has not referred publicly to the issue. A group of legislators from the governing Nueva Mayoría have backed the draft law.

The citizens of the Glacier Republic promise they won’t back down until a strong law on glaciers is passed.

“For the time being, the glaciers belong to the Glacier Republic, and we will be in a dispute with the Chilean state until we see a determined commitment to a real law,” Asún said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

A boy grazes his cattle on farmland close to the site of a landslide in northern Pakistan’s Bagrot valley. Credit: Saleem Shaikh/IPS

By Saleem Shaikh and Sughra Tunio
BINDO GOL, Pakistan, Jan 15 2015 (IPS)

Khaliq-ul-Zaman, a farmer from the remote Bindo Gol valley in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, has long lived under the shadow of disaster.

With plenty of fertile land and fresh water, this scenic mountain valley would be an ideal dwelling place – if not for the constant threat of the surrounding glacial lakes bursting their ridges and gushing down the hillside, leaving a trail of destruction behind.

“We can safely say that over 16,000 have been displaced due to [glacial lake outburst floods], and remain so even after several months.” -- Khalil Ahmed, national programme manager of a climate mitigation project in northern Pakistan
There was a time when families like Zaman’s lived in these distant valleys undisturbed, but hotter temperatures and heavier rains, which experts say are the result of global warming, have turned areas like Bindo Gol into a soup of natural hazards.

Landslides, floods and soil erosion have become increasingly frequent, disrupting channels that carry fresh water from upstream springs into farmlands, and depriving communities of their only source of fresh water.

“Things were becoming very difficult for my family,” Zaman told IPS. “I began to think that farming was no longer viable, and was considering abandoning it and migrating to nearby Chitral [a town about 60 km away] in search of labour.”

He was not alone in his desperation. Azam Mir, an elderly wheat farmer from the Drongagh village in Bindo Gol, recalled a devastating landslide in 2008 that wiped out two of the most ancient water channels in the area, forcing scores of farmers to abandon agriculture and relocate to nearby villages.

“Those who could not migrate out of the village suffered from water-borne diseases and hunger,” he told IPS.

Now, thanks to a public-private sector climate adaptation partnership aimed at reducing the risk of disasters like glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), residents of the northern valleys are gradually regaining their livelihoods and their hopes for a future in the mountains.

Bursting at the seams

According to the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD), there were some 2,400 potentially hazardous glacial lakes in the country’s remotest mountain valleys in 2010, a number that has now increased to over 3,000.

Chitral district alone is home to 549 glaciers, of which 132 have been declared ‘dangerous’.

Climatologists say that rising temperatures are threatening the delicate ecosystem here, and unless mitigation measures are taken immediately, the lives and livelihoods of millions will continue to be at risk.

One of the most successful initiatives underway is a four-year, 7.6-million-dollar project backed by the U.N. Adaptation Fund, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the government of Pakistan.

Signed into existence in 2010, its main focus, according to Field Manager Hamid Ahmed Mir, has been protection of lives, livelihoods, existing water channels and the construction of flood control infrastructure including check dams, erosion control structures and gabion walls.

Labourers construct flood-control gabion walls – structures constructed by filling large galvanized steel baskets with rock – in northern Pakistan’s remote Bindo Gol valley. Credit: Saleem Shaikh/IPS

The project has brought tremendous improvements to people here, helping to reduce damage to streams and allowing the sustained flow of water for drinking, sanitation and irrigation purposes in over 12 villages.

“We plan to extend such infrastructure in another 10 villages of the valley, where hundreds of households will benefit from the initiative,” Mir told IPS.

Further afield, in the Bagrot valley of Gilgit, a district in Gilgit-Baltistan province that borders KP, NGOs are rolling out similar programmes.

Zahid Hussain, field officer for the climate adaptation project in Bagrot, told IPS that 16,000 of the valley’s residents are vulnerable to GLOF and flash floods, while existing sanitation and irrigation infrastructure has suffered severe damage over the last years due to inclement weather.

Located some 800 km from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, Bagrot is comprised of 10 scattered villages, whose population depends for almost all its needs on streams that bubble forth from the Karakoram Mountains, a sub-range of the Hindu Kush Himalayas and the world’s most heavily glaciated area outside of the Polar Regions.

Residents like Sajid Ali, also a farmer, are pinning all their hopes on infrastructure development that will preserve this vital resource, and protect his community against the onslaught of floods.

An even bigger concern, he told IPS, is the spread of water-borne diseases as floods and landslides leave behind large silt deposits upstream.

Preparing for the worst

Just as risk reduction structures are key to preventing humanitarian crises, so too is building community resilience and awareness among the local population, experts say.

So far, some two million people in the Bindo Gol and Bagrot valleys have benefitted from community mitigation schemes, not only from improved access to clean water, but also from monitoring stations, site maps and communications systems capable of alerting residents to a coming catastrophe.

Khalil Ahmed, national programme manager for the project, told IPS that early warning systems are now in place to inform communities well in advance of outbursts or flooding, giving families plenty of time to evacuate to safer grounds.

While little official data exists on the precise number of people affected by glacial lake outbursts, Ahmed says, “We can safely say that over 16,000 have been displaced, and remain so even after several months.”

Over the past 17 months alone, Pakistan has experienced seven glacial lake outbursts that not only displaced people, but also wiped out standing crops and ruined irrigation and water networks all throughout the north, according to Ghulam Rasul, a senior climatologist with the PMD in Islamabad.

The situation is only set to worsen, as temperatures rise in the mountainous areas of northern Pakistan and scientists predict more extreme weather in the coming decades, prompting an urgent need for greater preparedness at all levels of society.

Several community-based adaptation initiatives including the construction of over 15 ‘safe havens’ – temporary shelter areas – in the Bindo Gol and Bagrot valleys have already inspired confidence among the local population, while widespread vegetation plantation on the mountain slopes act as a further buffer against landslides and erosion.

Scientists and activists say that replicating similar schemes across the northern regions will prevent unnecessary loss of life and save the government millions of dollars in damages.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Technicians from Peru’s national water authority, ANA, inspecting a polluted stretch of river in the department of Huancavelica in south-central Peru. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Jun 10 2014 (IPS)

Peru urgently needs a national plan for the management of water over the next two decades, one that will take into account the effects of climate change and the social and environmental conflicts triggered by problems over water.

In his office surrounded by papers, maps and graphics, Humberto Cruz, an engineer with the national water authority, ANA, told IPS that the country desperately needs a plan to improve the unequal distribution of water and its inefficient use in this South American country.

Cruz and other technicians in ANA spent over a year drawing up a draft plan, which President Ollanta Humala said he would present in March. However, it has not yet been passed by Congress, despite the president’s emphasis of the importance of recognising that access to clean water is a basic right.

The situation involving water in Peru is not encouraging, although some efforts have been made, the ANA technicians told IPS.

“The information we have on the watersheds in the highlands and the Amazon rainforest is very generic….What I have found is data with a very high margin of error,” Cruz said.

The expert said that due to the margin of error, the estimates were up to 20 percent too high or too low, which means there is a distorted assessment of the water situation in the country – and as a result, decisions on access to water may be misguided.

There is no reliable information on the amount of water in 119 of the 159 river basins in the Andes highlands and Amazon jungle that supply household needs as well as different activities in the country, such as mining, the oil and gas industry and agriculture.

The 119 watersheds for which there is no reliable information represent 75 percent of the country’s river basins and over 95 percent of the volume of water available to the Peruvian population. And they are mainly in the areas where social conflicts have broken out over water.

“Due to the lack of reliable information, the decisions taken by the state with regard to productive activities in the interior of the country can affect communities that depend heavily on water, especially in the upper reaches of the watersheds,” environmental engineer Pavel Aquino, who saw these cases in his work in ANA and the Ministry of Energy and Mines, told IPS.

Aquino said that problems over access to water fuelled rural migration, which in turn drives up demand for water in cities along the coast, where it is especially scarce.

“There is unequal distribution of water in the national territory,” Ismael Muñoz, an economist at the Pontifical Catholic University, told IPS. “The result is that although 70 percent of the population lives along the Pacific coast, they have only 1.8 percent of the water, because of the way nature has distributed it,” he wrote in an academic paper.

Muñoz also noted that “because the water is mainly – up to 80 percent – used in agriculture, the state has prioritised coastal areas when it comes to investment in water supplies, accentuating the regional inequality with respect to the highlands and the jungle.”

The other problem, according to Aquino, is that “a high margin of error in the information on water supply in the river basins” means that if the estimate of the amount of water is too high, less money is invested in infrastructure works for water supply, such as reservoirs, dams, and water transfer or irrigation projects.

Conversely, if the estimate of the water supply is too low, more funds than are strictly necessary could be invested in such infrastructure, the engineer said.

There is only reliable data available on the main rivers along the coast. In the case of rivers in the Amazon jungle and the Andes, information has not been steadily available over the last 10 years, nor is there broad coverage, the ANA technicians said.

There is a shortage of hydrological stations to monitor the rivers. Peru has a total of 1,832 meteorological and hydrological stations, of which only 864 were operating as of March, according to the national meteorological and hydrological service, SENAMHI. And of these, just 142 measure water flow.

SENAMHI is in charge of keeping hydrological statistics and supplying them to the institutions involved, like ANA. But insufficient budget funds have made it impossible to install the necessary stations.

For that reason, ANA and the Environment Ministry are working to set up new stations in pilot basins.

According to SENAMHI technicians consulted by IPS, in the case of basins that do not have a single monitoring station, data is extrapolated from the information available on the nearest basins.

The ANA experts, meanwhile, told IPS that at least 10 years worth of solid data is needed in order for the results of the monitoring to be reliable.

The preliminary draft of the national plan on the management of water includes an assessment of the quality and quantity of water in the country’s river basins, based on this patchy data.

ANA’s press office informed IPS that the draft law is being reevaluated due to changes in the leadership of the water authority in April. The new head of the agency, Juan Carlos Sevilla, has not publicly spoken out on the plan that was already ready when he was appointed.

Josefa Rojas, the Environment Ministry’s head of climate change adaptation projects, told IPS that the preliminary evaluation of water supplies that was carried out was a step forward and that “we can’t wait until we have all of the information. It’s time to accumulate verified data in order to project what is going to happen with the water that we need in order to live.”

The Ministry has put a priority on the gathering of detailed information on 30 high-mountain basins, due to the accelerated melting of the glaciers which feed the rivers.

Although the plan is still pending, ANA managed to get the Ministry of Economy and Finance to transfer some four million dollars, of the 12.5 million dollars requested to carry out the studies needed to assess the quantity of water in 12 basins where social conflicts over water are raging.

ANA is also helping to organise the creation of water councils, to draw up new hydrological studies and improve watershed management in coordination with regional and local authorities, local residents and companies. But the challenges that lie ahead are daunting.

El Morado Superior glacier in the Andes mountain chain in central Chile. Credit: Orlando Ruz/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Feb 24 2014 (IPS)

The idea sounds like harebrained science-fiction, but the accelerated retreat of glaciers due to global warming and the effects of mining is leading scientists to seek to restore or recreate these valuable reservoirs of fresh water.

“There are a number of technologies for saving and creating new glaciers,” Chilean glaciologist Cedomir Marangunic told Tierramérica.“To create a new glacier the natural process must be simulated, that is, winter snow accumulation must be greater than the summer melting. And that is not difficult to achieve; the main thing is to do it at minimum cost and in an environmentally sustainable way.” – Cedomir Marangunic

This sounds like a sweet promise for Chile, a mining country with at least 3,100 glaciers, most of which are clearly retreating, according to official data.

Glaciers, huge masses of ice and recrystallised snow, store 69 percent of the planet’s fresh water. They form when annual snowfall exceeds the amount of snow melted in summer, and accumulate enormous amounts of material over geologically short time frames.

But when it comes to the work of human hands, the time needed to create a glacier depends on the money invested, Marangunic said. The minimum time for a sufficient mass of snow to turn completely to ice is three years, he said.

“The natural process must be simulated, that is, winter snow accumulation must be greater than the summer melting. And that is not difficult to achieve; the main thing is to do it at minimum cost and in an environmentally sustainable way,” said Marangunic, a geologist at the University of Chile who holds a doctorate in glaciology from Ohio State University in the United States.

The techniques he has tested “aim at reducing melting on the ice surface, or at increasing snow accumulation,” he said.

In experiments in Chile, an artificial deposit of ice was covered with rocky detritus, which reduced ablation (the loss of ice mass) to one-quarter or one-fifth of normal, the expert told Tierramérica.

Marangunic heads a company that carries out research projects on glaciers, snow and avalanches. In 2007 he did an experiment transporting a mass of ice from one place to another.

Using mining trucks, 30,000 tonnes of ice were taken in one day to a pre-prepared site. In its original location, the ice was retreating 15 cm per year, while in the new site it retreated 30 cm the first year, but then less and less, as expected. In 2012, the ice retreated only three centimetres.

The expert tried transforming an ice field into a small glacier, by putting up barriers like those used for avalanche protection or on ski pistes, and modifying them to change wind direction during storms. This had the effect of doubling snow accumulation.

Among the most frequently used techniques is “covering part of the glacier surface with geotextile sheets, which reduces surface ablation,” the glaciologist said.

Marangunic pointed out that care was needed, for example, when a glacier suffers impacts and “water flows into the glacier’s basin due to rapid melting of the ice mass, but is then removed for artificial snow accumulation.”

The whole process, he said, “may affect the local ecosystem, which must be managed in order to avoid harm.”

In the view of Matías Asun, the head of Greenpeace Chile, these studies are inconclusive and “provide no basis to indicate they may be viable, sufficient, successful, cost-effective technologies, let alone that they may be applicable to all areas where there are glaciers.”

In a dry winter, for instance, there would not be enough snow for the accumulation a new glacier needs. And, because of climate change, it is expected that there will be increasingly more dry winters, Asun said.

“I don’t doubt the good intentions of those who are trying to develop strategies to protect glaciers, because it is a fact that many of the risks could be minimised,” Asun told Tierramérica.

“The key thing is to protect existing glaciers effectively. The glaciers are there, and they should stay there,” he said.

In Latin America, 82 percent of the reserves of fresh water in glaciers are in Chile, according to Greenpeace. But a large proportion of Chilean glaciers are, or will be, threatened by climate change and the actions of the mining industry.

“They are a strategic water reserve and an important part of the region’s heritage, yet at the moment they are not protected by law,” as they are in neighbouring Argentina, Asun said.

Current legislation allows a productive project to encroach on a glacier, if the impact is stated in the environmental impact study and some form of compensation is made.

In a recent appearance before parliament, glaciologist Alexander Brenning, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, said the magnitude of interventions on glaciers in Chile was unparalleled in the world, and he urged that the cumulative effects be assessed.

Parliament is studying a bill that would include a clear definition of glaciers and a permanent register of them.

In Marangunic’s view, it is essential that the definition does not close off a large part of the territory to all kinds of activities, such as tourism or development projects, “without contributing anything to the permanence of glaciers.”

The ownership status of glaciers must be established, especially those situated on private land, he said.

“Will they be able to be purchased and traded, as happens with water rights?” asked the expert, referring to the Water Code of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), which made water a private resource.

Mining projects like the Anglo American company’s Los Bronces, the state Chile Copper Corporation’s Andina 244 and Escalones, and Barrick Gold’s Pascua Lama, are the main threat to several glaciers in this country, according to environmentalists.

For Marangunic, in contrast, while “some mining” may damage glaciers, “environmental pollution in big cities like Santiago, or smoke from burning pastures and forests,” also affect the ice masses.

Therefore, in his view, the future law must be even-handed for all. “How can Santiago be penalised for producing the smog that affects the glaciers in the mountains?” he asked.

Stopping the retreat of a relatively small glacier can be achieved in a year. “But getting a glacier that has been shrinking for decades or centuries back to its original size will surely take as long again,” although a large investment may accelerate the process, he said.

In Asun’s view, “the urgent thing now is not to wait thousands of years to reproduce a glacier, to see if it works, but to proteet what is already there.”

Playing God “turns out like we saw in Jurassic Park. Since the glaciers are there, let’s protect them,” he concluded.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Experts warn that climate change is responsible for melting glaciers on the Himalayas. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
JHIRPU PHULPINGKATT, Nepal , Jun 2 2013 (IPS)

Residents of Jhirpu Phulpingkatt, a village nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas, about 110 km from Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, are on red alert.

As the impacts of climate change batter the towering mountains above them, these villagers on the banks of the Bhote Koshi river have started to dread the sound of incoming text messages, which may carry evacuation warnings.

Their fears are not unfounded. Research conducted by experts from the University of Milan shows that the snowline in the Everest region of the Himalayas, also known as the Khumbu region in the northeast of Nepal, has receded by 180 metres in the last 50 years, while glaciers have shrunk by 13 percent.

Last week all eyes were on the Himalayas’ highest peak – 29,000-foot Mt. Everest, whose summit is bisected by the China-Nepal border – in honor of the 60^th anniversary of the first human ascent of the mountain.

But the momentous occasion presented as much cause for panic as for celebration, when images showing bare rock jutting out from under the receding ice caps called attention to the rapidly changing face of this majestic range.

Sudeep Thakuri, who led the Italian team of researchers, told IPS that the continuous and increased melting is most likely caused by rising temperatures, which were 0.6-degrees Celsius higher this year than they have been in previous years.

Together, the two phenomena have led to the proliferation of massive glacier lakes – melting ice held back by natural dams of moraine and debris – that could spell disaster for those living in the rocky ravines down below.

Avalanches, erosion, heavy water pressure and even snowstorms could cause glacial outbursts, “releasing millions of cubic metres of water in a few hours (resulting in) catastrophic flooding downstream”, according to a study by Germanwatch, an NGO dedicated to sustainable development.

Glacier lake outbursts are not uncommon, and over the last century scientists have recorded at least 50 incidents of these icy lakes breaking their dams. One of the most devastating incidents occurred when the Sangwang Cho glacial lake in Tibet burst in 1954, flooding the cities of Gyangze (located 120 km downstream), and Xigaze (about 200 km away).

Now experts warn that the lakes are filling up faster than ever before and new lakes are being created at an alarming rate.

“If climate warming continues, as is predicted, accelerated glacial thinning and retreat are likely,” Pradeep Mool, programme coordinator at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu, told IPS, warning that “the danger posed by glacial lake outburst floods will increase.”

According to ICIMOD research, there are over 20,000 glacial lakes in the Hindu Kush Himalayas, stretching from Afghanistan in the west to Myanmar (formerly Burma) in the east.

The Dudh Kosi river basin in eastern Nepal is home to 278 glaciers, some of which are receding at a rate of 74 metres annually. Mool told IPS that the region is now home to 34 lakes, including 24 recent formations, of which ten have been tagged as potentially dangerous.

Mool warned that earthquakes also pose a serious threat. “The Hindu Kush Himalaya region is one of extreme seismic instability. Earthquakes could act as major triggers for glacial lake outbursts,” he stressed.

There has been at least one reported lake outburst in the last 500 years in the Seti Khola region that was triggered by seismic activity, the scientist said. That outburst produced a 50-metre-high debris field in the western region of Pokhara.

According to Thakuri, the future wellbeing of glaciers is largely dependent on the climate, adding that much more concrete scientific research is required to determine possible outcomes.

But those living in the Himalayan foothills, like the villagers of Jhirpu Phulpingkatt, say there is evidence enough of the possible disasters to come.

The steep mountain walls in this village, mostly covered in lush vegetation, are frequently disrupted by deep cave-ins caused by earth slips that follow heavy rains.

At the small power plant that lies just next to the Bhote Koshi river, officials rely on a warning system to give residents adequate notice to escape any lake outbursts.

However the plant’s acting manager, Janak Raj Pant, told IPS that the warning would only give an escape window of between six and 10 minutes, and extends only to the Nepali border, which is just 10 km from the plant. But many of the glacial lakes that could impact this village and others lie in Chinese-controlled Tibet, where the warning system does not reach.

ICIMOD’s Mool told IPS there is an urgent need for better monitoring of lakes and their water levels. He pointed to a few isolated examples in which outlets have been cut into the dams of some glacial lakes in Nepal and Bhutan to let out excess water, but Mool said such preventive action needed be more uniform.

There is also an economic imperative to take action, at least in the Bhote Koshi valley, where Nepali authorities are planning to build at least four new power plants on the river.

Hubbard glacier in Seward, Alaska. Credit: Bigstock

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 16 2013 (IPS)

Many eyes are turning north to the Arctic, some in horror at the rapid decline of a key component of our life support system, others in eager anticipation at the untapped resources beneath the vanishing snow and ice.

“I’ve worked in the north for 21 years and the scale and speed of change up there is astonishing,” said Douglas Clark of the University of Saskatchewan."This has and will have spectacular consequences for the rest of the world." -- Sarah Cornell of the Stockholm Resilience Center

“These changes, taken as whole, and reflected in our report, keep me awake at night,” Clark told IPS.

Rapid and even abrupt changes are occurring on multiple fronts across the Arctic, according to the Arctic Resilience Report (ARR).

And what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.

“It’s the first international report to tell the world to buckle up, we’re on a wild roller coaster ride and we don’t know what’s coming,” he said.

The ARR report is a two-year collaboration between experts in the Nordic countries, Russia, Canada and the United States, and includes indigenous perspectives. It is a cutting edge assessment of how changes in climate, ecosystems, economics, and society interact.

The report was prepared for and released at the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Kiruna, Sweden on Wednesday.

“What is happening in the Arctic has profound implications for every part of the world,” said Sarah Cornell, lead author of the study.

Global warming is not only melting snow and ice, it is warming the Arctic ocean and the surrounding lands. Seasons are changing, permafrost is thawing, new species are invading, Arctic species are struggling, lakes are vanishing, and rivers are being redirected by the melting landscape, the report documents.

Some Arctic ecosystems are undergoing catastrophic changes, and some of these are large-scale and irreversible, Cornell, a scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, told IPS.

While the Arctic is as remote as the moon for many people, it is intimately interconnected with the rest of the world. Weather is driven largely by the cold Arctic and Antarctic regions balanced by the hot tropics. But the Arctic is rapidly defrosting – last summer the sea ice shrunk to half of what it was less than 30 years ago. The ice decline and the heating up of the Arctic have been accelerating in recent years.

“This has and will have spectacular consequences for the rest of the world. We don’t know what they’ll all be,” Cornell said.

The Arctic is home to cultures and species found nowhere else and they can’t go any further north to escape the rising temperatures. It is a real struggle to survive, said Tero Mustonen, president of Snowchange Cooperative, a network of local and indigenous cultures around the world.

“The Arctic is undergoing fundamental changes. Moose are showing up in the tundra for the first time along with new insects, plants and even trees,” Mustonen told IPS from his home in eastern Finland.

Mustonen, a co-author of the ARR, works with Chukchi reindeer herding communities from northeastern Siberia who have roamed those remote lands for hundreds of the years. Like many indigenous communities living on the land, they have a deep ecological, cultural and spiritual connection to their landscape. And that landscape is changing so much they sometimes don’t recognise their own home, he said.

“The Chukchi don’t easily share their thoughts. But the elders have a clear and powerful message to convey to the world: ‘Nature doesn’t trust humans any more’.”

However, the focus of the eight-nation Arctic Council was primarily on future shipping opportunities, access to oil, gas and mineral resources, and geopolitics, with China, Japan, India, South Korea, Singapore and Italy granted observer status on the Council while Canada blocked the European Union’s application.

The Council is the world’s main international forum on northern issues and will be led by Canada for the next two years. Canada said it will focus on economic development. Estimates show that the region may have 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30 percent of undiscovered gas deposits, and vast quantities of mineral resources.

The Council’s much-lauded scientific research will now be focused on how to develop northern resources for the benefit of northerners. Canada recently drew criticism for re-directing its own scientific research to supporting business and industry.

Secretary of State John Kerry represented the U.S. at the Arctic Council, demonstrating Washington’s renewed interest in the Arctic. The White House also released its new National Strategy for the Arctic Region. While acknowledging the profound impacts of global warming on the region and indigenous people, the U.S. strategy says the region will help to supply U.S. energy needs well into the future.

At the meeting, members adopted an agreement on marine oil pollution preparedness. Some indigenous and environmental groups urged the Council to place a moratorium on drilling for oil in the Arctic given the dangerous conditions and difficulties of clean up.

Greenpeace International said the oil pollution agreement offered no specific practical minimum standards and had no provisions to hold companies liable for the full costs and damages.

“There were two conferences going on here — one that warned of the dangers of climate change and rapid industrialisation in this fragile region, and another, attended by foreign ministers, that took almost no concrete steps to address them,” said Ruth Davis, Greenpeace International senior policy advisor.

Arctic peoples aren’t necessarily opposed to economic development but they do want to be in control of what happens. However, Arctic nations and local communities are at very different stages. In Finland and Russia, indigenous people have no official land or water rights, unlike Canada or Alaska, said Mustonen.

“The rights and cultures of indigenous peoples in these regions have to be taken seriously in order to integrate their needs into any form of development,” he said.

Environmental groups and indigenous Diaguita communities of the Huasco Valley in northern Chile celebrated a court decision Wednesday that will bring to a complete halt work on the Pascua Lama gold, silver and copper mine belonging to Canada’s Barrick gold.

“The mine was approved on the condition that the glaciers would not be touched. But the General Water Department (DGA) has repeatedly confirmed that Pascua Lama is destroying glaciers,” said Lucio Cuenca, director of the Latin American Observatory of Environmental Conflicts (OLCA).

He told IPS that “illegal work on the mine has caused episodes of severe pollution in rivers in the area, and the environmental institutions have responded in a biased manner. So we believe it is a very good thing that the courts are putting things in order, even if this is a temporary measure.”

Located at 4,000 metres altitude in the Andes mountains on the border between Chile and Argentina, Pascua Lama, a binational open-pit mine, is the world’s highest-altitude open-pit gold, silver and copper mine.

On the Chilean side, it is at the headwaters of the El Estrecho river, in the province of Huasco, Atacama region, some 700 km north of Santiago.

Barrick had originally planned to actually move three glaciers to get at the minerals beneath.

The unanimous verdict handed down by the appeals court in the city of Copiapó, the capital of Atacama region, was in response to legal action brought by Lorenzo Soto, the lawyer representing the local Diaguita communities of Huasco who are opposed to the mine because they say it will threaten their water supply and pollute the glaciers.

In the lawsuit, Soto cited environmental infractions that triggered sanctions from government bodies like the National Geology and Mining Service (SERNAGEOMIN), the National Evaluation System and the Superintendency of the Environment.

Soto said the irregularities committed by the Canadian company included “the destruction of glaciers Toro 1, Toro 2 and Esperanza, located in the environs of the mine, and the pollution of water resources” with heavy concentrations of arsenic, aluminium, copper and sulphate that threaten the El Estrecho river.

The company had already brought construction of the mine to a halt in November 2012 on orders from SERNAGEOMIN, which fined it for failing to comply with safety standards.

But Wednesday’s ruling completely suspended work on the mine.

However, a spokesperson for the company clarified that on the Argentine side of the border, work would continue.

“What this court measure does is confirm that the oversight and fines by the country’s institutions have been absolutely insufficient and biased, and have failed to take into account the gravity of the denunciations made by the community with respect to the infractions committed by Barrick in the operation of Pascua Lama,” Cuenca said.

Oriel Campillay, president of the Chiguinto Diaguita Indigenous Community, told IPS that the communities opposed to the mine were pleased with the shutdown of the project.

“We live in a beautiful valley where we grow avocados, grapes, lemons, apricots, peaches and pears, and the El Estrecho river is essential for us,” he said.

Speaking “in a personal capacity,” Campillay said he would not be opposed to the mine “if things were done properly.”

“We are asking for our communities to take part in the oversight of the project, but the company refused,” he said.

Barrick has not yet stated whether it will appeal to the Supreme Court or address the environmental irregularities it is accused of.

Barrick Gold’s vice president of corporate affairs for South America, Rodrigo Jiménez, said the company had not yet been officially notified of the decision by the court, and was thus unable to comment on its content or implications.

The government of right-wing President Sebastián Piñera surprised activists by applauding the court ruling.

Interior Minister Andrés Chadwick said the verdict “comes as no surprise to us, and we believe it is a good thing that it was possible to bring work on the mine to a halt, through a judicial organism, while Pascua Lama effectively lives up to the measures that had already been ordered by the Superintendency of the Environment.”

Meanwhile, Environment Minister María Ignacia Benítez said “this ruling is in line with what the government has been doing…As an environmental institution, we are not willing to accept projects that do not live up to environmental resolutions and commitments.”

Cuenca said the government’s statements were “brazen” because “what the court is doing is precisely rebuking the government and the state services for not fulfilling their role.”

“I think it is amazingly cheeky for a minister to come out and say that she thinks it’s a good thing, after they have failed to do their work and to exercise proper oversight. What’s more, what should really happen is for Pascua Lama’s environmental permit to be revoked,” the activist said.

He also stressed the role of the local communities in the struggle against projects that threaten their sustainability.

“The role of citizens, organisations, and in the case of Pascua Lama, the community of Huasco Valley has to be strengthened,” Cuenca said.

“This conflict has dragged on for at least 10 years, and what is happening is the result of the protests and mobilisation by the community,” he added.

In addition, he said that there are now “more sensitive courts that are better-informed about the country’s environmental institutions and regulations and their consequences. Today there is a much more progressive interpretation of the legislation compared to what we had two years ago, and that has been demonstrated in a string of rulings.”

Cuenca said that was due to “a combination of new conditions in the country, but for us, the essential thing is the role that the community has played.”

Campillay, meanwhile, said the Diaguita communities were organising to demand the implementation of International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169, which requires that indigenous and tribal peoples are consulted on issues that affect them.

A favourable verdict was already obtained in the El Morro gold and silver mine in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. And now, he said, native communities would continue to challenge Pascua Lama and any projects that they feel threaten their integrity.

“We are surrounded by mining companies, and we want to be given the opportunity to decide what is done on our land, rather than having it be decided between four walls,” he said.

Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Mar 11 2013 (IPS)

“Canada is not a country, it’s winter,” Canadians say with pride. But the nation’s long, fearsome winters will live only in memory and song for Canadian children born this decade.

Winters are already significantly warmer and shorter than just 30 years ago. The temperature regimes and plant life of the south have marched more than 700 kilometres northward, new research shows.If we don't curb carbon emissions, Arctic Sweden might be more like the south of France by the end of the century.

The frozen north is leaving and won’t be back for millennia due to heat-trapping carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, experts say.

By 2091, the north will have seasons, temperatures and possibly vegetation comparable to those found today 20 to 25 degrees of latitude further south, said Ranga Myneni of the Department of Earth and Environment, Boston University.

“If we don’t curb carbon emissions, Arctic Sweden might be more like the south of France by the end of the century,” Myneni, co-author of the Nature Climate Change study published Sunday, told IPS.

Canada, Northern Eurasia and the Arctic are warming faster than elsewhere as a result of the loss of snow and ice, he said. In 90 years, Alaska or Canada’s Baffin Island in the Arctic may have seasons and temperatures comparable to those in today’s Oregon and southern Ontario.

Myneni is member of an international team of 21 authors from seven countries who used newly improved ground and satellite data to measure changes in temperatures and vegetation over the four seasons from roughly above the U.S.-Canada border (45 degrees latitude) to the Arctic Ocean.

They found temperatures over the northern lands have increased at different rates during the four seasons over the past 30 years, with winters warming most followed by spring temperatures.

There is a huge difference between winter and summer temperatures in the north, but that difference is less and less every year, according to the study, “Temperature and vegetation seasonality diminishment over northern lands”. This measured change is happening faster than projected by climate models.

“We are changing seasonality…. The north is becoming like the south, losing its sharp contrasts between the four seasons,” said Myneni.

One clear sign is the greening of Arctic. The types of plants that could go no further north than 57 degrees north 30 years ago are now found at 64 degrees.

This change is “easily visible on the ground as an increasing abundance of tall shrubs and tree incursions in several locations all over the circumpolar Arctic,” said co-author Terry Callaghan of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the University of Sheffield, UK.

Seasonality is often called the rhythm of life. Changes will impact many species, considering the enormous numbers of birds, animals and others species that migrate north to feast during the short northern summer.

“The way of life of many organisms on Earth is tightly linked to seasonal changes in temperature and availability of food, and all food on land comes first from plants,” said Scott Goetz, deputy director and senior scientist, Woods Hole Research Center, Falmouth, U.S.

“Think of migration of birds to the Arctic in the summer and hibernation of bears in the winter: Any significant alterations to temperature and vegetation seasonality are likely to impact life not only in the north but elsewhere in ways that we do not yet know,” Goetz said in a statement.

The Arctic is home to millions of square kilometres of permafrost with its vast amount of frozen carbon. The amplified warming of the Arctic will release some of this carbon, leading to greater warming around the planet for hundreds of years, the study also warns.

In recent weeks, satellite images of the Arctic Ocean have revealed large fractures in the sea ice during the coldest part of winter. Sea ice does not normally begin to break up until at least April. The mid-February fracturing was extensive and unusual, sea ice expert Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, told IPS.

Last summer’s record melt of sea ice was 80 percent greater when compared to summers 30 or more years ago. This winter, most of the ice in the Arctic is thin, first-year ice that is more easily fractured and likely to melt quickly when the summer comes.

The ramifications of this planetary-scale change are just beginning to be understood.

The 2012 sea ice collapse amplified the destructive power of Superstorm Sandy, researchers reported last week in the journal of Oceanography. The severe loss of summertime Arctic sea ice appears to affect the jet stream, IPS has previously reported.

That helped Hurricane Sandy take a powerful turn west instead of steering northeast and out to sea like most October hurricanes, researchers say in the paper “Superstorm Sandy: A Series of Unfortunate Events?”.

It’s not only sea ice that is in full meltdown mode. Canada’s land-based glaciers are also melting. Little studied until recently, these glaciers are third in volume only to those of Antarctica and Greenland. By the end of this century, 20 percent will have melted, raising global sea levels by 3.5 cm.

Considering oceans cover 71 percent of the planet, that is an incredible amount of ice turning into water.

“We believe that the mass loss is irreversible in the foreseeable future” assuming continued climate change, wrote researchers from the Netherlands and the United States in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Kashmir's Kolhai glacier has been receding steadily. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, India, Aug 31 2012 (IPS)

Jowhar Ahmed, an air-conditioner dealer in Srinagar, is pleased at a spurt in business this summer caused by temperatures soaring over 35 degrees Celsius – unusual in this alpine valley ringed by snow-capped mountains.

“I sold more than 70 air-conditioners in just one month,” Ahmed, who runs the Oriental Sales electrical goods outlet, told IPS.  To cope with the demand Ahmed and other dealers have begun stocking air-conditioners in Srinagar rather than book orders for later delivery.

That the weather is warming over Kashmir is not news for climate scientists who have shown in several studies that the glaciers in the vast Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalaya (HKKH) region – called the world’s ‘third pole’ – are melting and receding at an increasing pace.

In the latest of these studies, European scientists led by Andreas Kaab of the department of geosciences, University of Oslo, have shown that glacial melt is worse in the Kashmir Himalayas than in other regions of the HKKH.

Kaab’s findings, published in the Aug. 23 edition of ‘Nature’, suggest that Kashmir’s glaciers may be receding by as much as half-a-metre annually, presenting an immediate threat to the rivers that  feed into the Indus basin.

“Glaciers are among the best indicators of terrestrial climate variability,” said Kaab in the study. “They contribute importantly to water resources in many mountainous regions and are a major contributor to global sea-level rise.”

Kaab said that while there is a paucity of glacier data in the HKKH region, there is “indirect evidence of a complex pattern of glacial responses” to climate change.

Prof. Shakil Romshoo, who teaches geology and geophysics at Kashmir University, says that studies that he and his colleagues conducted in 2009 showed that Kashmir’s glaciers were melting at an increasing pace.

“We have been saying for many years now that Kashmir’s glaciers are melting at an ever faster rate,” Romshoo told IPS. His team found that the Kolhai glacier, one of the largest in Kashmir, had shrunk to 11 sq km, losing two sq km over a period of 40 years.

Another scientific study on the Kashmir Himalayas had also shown that the snow cover over the region was on the decline. The study, led by glaciologist H. S. Negi, was published in the December 2009 issue of ‘Journal of Earth System Sciences’, a bi-monthly published in India.

Negi, who is attached to the Snow and Avalanche Study Establishment of India’s defence ministry, based his findings on 20 years of remote satellite-based climatic data, covering the period 1988 – 2008.

According to Negi’s findings, where total snowfall in the Kashmir valley was 1,082 cm in 2004-05, it had declined to 968 cm during 2005-2006 and reduced further to 961 cm by 2006-2007.

Experts in Kashmir say that the new findings by the European scientists are a concern since the rivers of the Indus basin are glacier-fed.

“Unlike in the Eastern Himalayas where rivers such as the Brahmaputra are mainly rain-fed, most of the water that goes into the Indus river comes from snowmelt, which includes glacial melt,” says Prof. Mohammad Sultan, who teaches geography in Kashmir University.

“This could cause huge problems for irrigation and generating power in northwestern India and Pakistan through which territories the rivers originating in Kashmir flow before ending up in the sea,” Sultan told IPS.

“The Indus water system is Pakistan’s lifeline as 75 to 80 percent of water received in this country comes from melting Himalayan glaciers,” says Irshad Muhammad Khan, executive director of the Global Change Impacts Studies Centre in Pakistan.

“This glacier melt forms the backbone of irrigation network in Pakistan with 90 percent of agricultural land being fed by the vastly spread irrigation network in Pakistan, one of the largest in the world,” Khan said told IPS over e-mail.

“Any disruption of water flow in the Indus would have grave implications for agriculture production in Pakistan,” Khan said.

The rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting has been the subject of international controversy ever since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations said, in its 2007 report, that they were melting so fast that they could vanish altogether by 2035.

After leading climate experts challenged the IPCC’s claim, the U.N. body’s Nobel prize-winning chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, was forced to admit publicly, in January 2010, that the projections had no scientific basis.

A study by scientists at the Universities of California and Potsdam, released in January 2011, showed that glaciers in the Karakoram range, in the northwestern part of the HKKH region, were actually advancing and that global warming was not the deciding factor in glacier melt.

Scientists are, however, agreed that changes in the size of glaciers in the HKKH directly affect Asia’s water resources and sea levels, though it has been difficult to accurately measure or monitor them.

‘An Inconvenient Truth’, a 2006 Oscar-winning documentary on former U.S. vice-president Al Gore’s campaign to create global warming had suggested that 40 percent of the world’s population depends on the snows and glaciers of the Himalayas for water supplies.

Melting glaciers are the most visible effect of global warming in the Swiss Alps. Meanwhile, permafrost is invisible and melting too, often causing rockfall and massive debris flows, ultimately threatening mountain villages.

Guttannen, home to 310 residents, is a tiny village in the Bernese Alps, the last one that travellers drive through on the way up to Grimsel Pass. It’s spring and the snow is retreating from the steep slopes of the valley. As the pass is still closed, calm reigns in the picturesque village centre. Only cowbells and the rushing of the nearby Aar river break the silence.

For some residents though, living in Guttannen has become rather uneasy and, on the long term, even dangerous. The root cause of the peril lies further uphill, in the northeastern flank of the 3,282 metres high Ritzlihorn. In July 2009, a huge rockfall had occurred and since then, massive debris flows have roared downhill each summer.

“These mudslides as well as the volume of transported rubble have grown from year to year,” says Nils Hählen, hydraulic engineer at the cantonal public works service. “The debris partly ends up in the Aar, lifting and widening its channel.” Within three years, 630,000 cubic metres were transported into the river, increasingly endangering civil infrastructure.

In summer, after heavy rainfall, the only road leading through the narrow valley often has to be temporarily closed. A house near the river already had to be taken down, the local sewage treatment plant may be next. Since 2010, the debris flows reach as far as the hamlet Boden, threatening ten houses and 30 inhabitants.

“The next few mudslides won’t be a big problem,” says Guttannen council leader Hans Abplanalp. However, some houses would effectively be threatened in two to five, others in five to seven years, he adds.

One of these homes belongs to Martin Leuthold. “I’ve lived here for 60 years and my father was already a farmer here,” he says. Leuthold claims he has no fear, as he’s grown up with the moods of nature. Nevertheless, the farmer doesn’t ignore the peril: “Perhaps nothing will happen for the next 10 years, but maybe this summer it could all rumble down on us. Nobody knows.”

Nearby, Hans von Weissenfluh lives less than 20 metres away from the river. “The threat is real, we can see it,” he says. Von Weissenfluh remembers well how impressive amounts of water and debris came down the Aar last summer. “Only five years ago, the river channel was much more narrow,” he notices.

Engineers, geologists and glaciologists assume permafrost melt to be the underlying problem. Permafrost is underground material such as rock or rubble that permanently remains at or below zero degrees centigrade. Ice is a possible, but not a necessary ingredient. “The issue is, that permafrost occurrence is generally not known,” says Nils Hählen. There are maps designed on calculated probabilities, but as the hydraulic engineer explains, in any case things have to be evaluated locally.

In northeastern mountain slopes, permafrost may occur roughly above 2,600 meters altitude. Scientists estimate that about 5 percent of Switzerland’s area contains permafrost. It stabilises steep rocky or scree slopes in the high mountains and protects them from erosion by serving as a kind of natural putty. When permafrost melts, the result may be rockfalls and debris flows. “The lower permafrost zones are the most vulnerable,” explains Hählen.

He locates the cause of permafrost melt in rising air temperatures which have been measured over the past years in the European Alps. Jeannette Nötzli, glaciologist at the University of Zurich, mentions that atmosphere and underground permafrost are often not directly coupled. Ice content and changes in surface coverage can mask atmospheric signals. Nötzli heads the Coordination Office of the Swiss Permafrost Monitoring Network PERMOS.

“As PERMOS’ systematic monitoring commenced in 2000, most of our data cover around a decade, whereas for robust statements about trends in climate science typically a 30-year period is considered,” Nötzli points out. “However,” the researcher adds, “much of our data points to permafrost degradation. For example, in the past three years active layer depths in summer have increased with new record values at many of the observed sites.”

Reliable forecasting of permafrost changes isn’t possible. In the case of Guttannen, experts limit their predictions to the next year. Hählen expects that in the long term, debris flows from the Ritzlihorn will stop, as ultimately the catchment area in the flank is limited.

Removing the rubble from the valley floor and the Aar is no option. It’s too risky, but also too costly. Additionally, dumping places in the region are limited. Only to remove the current rubble from the river would cost more than 18 million Swiss Francs and accumulate to at least 50,000 lorry loads.

There’s not much hope for the residents of Boden. Ultimately, they’ll have to leave their homes and resettle somewhere else. Hans Abplanalp, the council president, has talked to all persons concerned. “Nearly all of them want to stay in Guttannen,” he says. “We can offer them land and homes to buy.”

Boden resident Hans von Weissenfluh plans to move up to Guttannen as soon as possible. Others such as Martin Leuthold are more hesitant. He wouldn’t mind living somewhere else in the village, but is reluctant to tear down his house and move all the belongings.

“That’s a lot of work,” he says. Leuthold fears he will not be fully compensated. He’d only be compensated for his stable if he built a new one in another place. “I wouldn’t know what to build a new stable for, as I’ll soon be retired.”