This documentary looks at one of Colombia’s largest indigenous groups, Wayuu, and their struggle for fresh water. Soon their water will be siphoned from their lands through new pipes to a nearby town, where the population is not indigenous. Due to a changing climate, water has become even scarcer in their community. One extraordinary woman fights for her community’s very survival.
The National Water Commission of Mexico (CONAGUA) has published the document “Dialogs for Water and Climate Change: Call to Action”, as a follow-up to the Dialogs on Water and Climate Change (D4WCC), held in last December 2010 in the framework of the COP 16. Continue reading
A project to improve water management in the capital Tegucigalpa is one of two first projects that the climate change Adaptation Fund has approved. The two projects (the other is in Senegal) together are worth US$ 14 million.
The proposal for the Tegucigalpa project was put forward by the Government of Honduras through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
This project will reduce the vulnerability of at least 13,000 of the poorest households in the capital region of Tegucigalpa in Honduras by improving water management. The region already suffers from a constant water shortage in many of its poor neighborhoods and an inability to harness the occasional heavy rains that cause floods and landslides resulting from rising temperatures brought about by climate change.
The Adaptation Fund Besides receives direct contributions from developed countries, and through about 2 percent on credits generated by the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which in turn operates under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Source: Adaption Fund, 17 Sep 2010 ; IRIN, 24 Sep 2010
The World Bank has approved a grant of US$450,000 for a programme to help mitigate the negative effects of glacial melting in Peru’s tropical Andean region. The grant will be used to gather scientific information on the impact of glacial melting. Andean glaciers, which supply 70mn people with water, have shrunk by 30% over the past three decades and are likely to disappear by 2030.
Read full article on: BNamericas.com [subscription site], 13 Jan 2010
Posted in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Water resources management
Tagged climate change, glaciers, Global Environment Facility, World Bank
Ecuador’s capital Quito is only guaranteed potable water supply up to 2015 due to the accelerated pace of glacier melting, according to several studies. A total of 25m is lost every year on average on the mountain which is the principal source of water for the Mica-Quito Sur potable water system.
Read the full article on: BNamericas.com [subscription site], 04 Jan 2010
Posted in Ecuador, Water resources management, Water supply
Tagged climate change, glaciers, urban water supply
When the tap across from her mud-walled home dried up in September [2009], Celia Cruz stopped making soups and scaled back washing for her family of five. She began daily pilgrimages to better-off neighborhoods, 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.
Ms. Cruz, 33, is considering moving back to countryside. “Two years ago this was never a problem. But if there’s not 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.
For the nearly 200 nations trying to hammer out an international climate accord in Copenhagen, the question of how to address the needs of dozens of countries like Bolivia is a central focus of the negotiations and a major obstacle to a treaty.
World leaders have long agreed that rich nations must provide money and technology to help developing nations adapt to problems that, to a large extent, have been created by smokestacks and tailpipes far away. But the specifics of that transfer — which countries will pay, how much and for what kinds of projects — remain contentious.
Last week, a group of the poorest small countries debated whether they would stage a walk-out in Copenhagen if rich nations failed to provide enough money. Todd Stern, the lead negotiator for the United States, while reiterating that the United States would help pay, bridled at the idea that the money was a “climate debt.” And on Friday, the European Union made an initial pledge to pay $3.5 billion annually for three years to help poor countries cope — though economists project the total cost to be $100 billion or more.
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 Solón, 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 Ramírez, a Bolivian glaciologist who has documented and projected the glaciers’ retreat for two decades.
The retreat has outpaced his wildest dreams. He had predicted that one glacier, Chacaltaya, would last until 2020. It disappeared this year. In 2006, he said El Alto water demand would outstrip supply by 2009. It happened.
But global warming alone cannot be blamed for the longstanding woes of this exotic but desperately poor landlocked country, where per capita income is around $1,000. Urban water supplies are also taxed by population growth as well as checkered management, in part because there is little money to manage anything, but also because the government nationalized the water company a few years ago, having declared water a human right. El Alto still does not employ a full-time water technician.
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 program at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz. “What’s at stake is conflict — you wouldn’t talk about civil war exactly. But it will be unrest.”
In fact, when taps dried up in Celia Cruz’s neighborhood, the Solidarity District of El Alto, rich La Paz residents still had water. In a nation that has rallied behind socialist rhetoric and indigenous rights, there were complaints. “The sense of injustice is palpable,” said Edwin Chuquimia Vélez, an official in El Alto formerly in charge of water.
Victor Hugo Rico, director of the state water company, Epsas, while acknowledging worries about supply, denied that there had been intentional rationing and said that three wells were being drilled to increase water to El Alto and that more were planned.
Glaciers are part of the majestic landscape here, visible from almost everywhere in the neighboring cities of La Paz and El Alto, each with one million people. Their disappearance from certain vistas is as startling to Bolivians as the absence of the twin towers is to New Yorkers.
“To see this change fills me with sadness. It fills me with pain,” said Gonzalo Jaimes, a climbing guide from La Paz.
Chacaltaya, at 17,500 feet, was the world’s highest ski area from 1939 until 2005, when the glacier retreated beyond the slopes. The lodge, still stocked with rental gear and decorated with ski murals, 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.
For residents, water has been the biggest issue. Though the region’s electricity comes from hydroelectric plants, these depend heavily on rainfall and water from the Amazon, so power loss has so far not been a problem.
In Khapi, a village two hours’ drive from La Paz, people regard the 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 dry months to keep crops watered. Today, with Illimani in retreat, water “just pours” off the glacier, a yellowish mix.
“It’s completely useless,” snorted Héctor Hugo Chura Chuque, vice mayor of the village, which has no plumbing and only intermittent electricity.
“A lot of us think about not having kids anymore,” said Margarita Limachi Álvarez, 46, a blue Andean cap with ear flaps pulled over her head. “Without water or food, how would we survive? Why bring them here to suffer?”Taps Run Dry
A hundred miles away, in a middle-class neighborhood of El Alto, water has also become a gnawing concern. From September through November, the taps gave forth at best eight hours a day, often with little pressure.
“Sometimes you didn’t have it in the morning. Sometimes you didn’t have it in the evening — you never knew,” said Julia Torrez, 31 and eight months pregnant, in a neat sitting room furnished with plaid couches and hung with oil paintings. When the tap started spurting, she recalled, she ran to fill an array of buckets and jugs, an incongruous routine for this family of jeans-wearing, college-educated professionals.
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 S.U.V.
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 intense sun. A drought killed 7,000 farm animals and sickened nearly 100,000.
Severe Storms
Severe storms normally associated with El Niño periods, every seventh year, now occur regularly. Warmer temperatures mean new crop pests — crickets and worms — as well as 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 analyzed or quantified by Epsas, the water company, for example.But with little cash or expertise, it is hard to plan a giant new reservoir or a system to transfer water from one part of the country to another. Bolivia’s poor, said Edwin Torrez Soria, an engineer with Aqua Sustentable, who works with villages near the Illimani glacier, “aren’t responsible for what’s happening to the glacier but they suffer the most, and unfortunately the government doesn’t have much of a plan.”
This year, the last days of November provided a bit of wet relief — the rainy season had started, about a month later than usual. The pipe outside Ms. Cruz’s house started running.
But the rain that had added ice to the glaciers now often just increases their runoff, because it is too warm to freeze anymore.
“Right now we’re living on additional glacier melt that won’t be here in a few years,” said Mr. Hoffmann, of the climate change program. “Isn’t that ironic?”
Source: Elisabeth Rosenthal and Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, New York Times, 13 Dec 2009
Posted in Bolivia, Water resources management
Tagged climate change, COP-15, glaciers, water shortage
Latin America is facing multiple water crises with far-reaching consequences for health, food security, renewable energy sources and export competitiveness, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) President Luis Alberto Moreno said.
“In Latin America, water is more intimately linked to development than any other region of the world,” Moreno said during a multimedia presentation, Latin American Solutions to the Water and Sanitation Crisis, made for the first time before the Development Congress of the International Water Association (IWA), which was held from Nov. 15-18, 2009.
The cross-sector importance of water in Latin America has become dramatically more evident in recent years. Droughts of historic proportions have caused electricity blackouts, crop losses, starvation and water rationing in countries as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Venezuela and Mexico.
Nicaragua and El Salvador were reeling from the impact of Hurricane Ida [at the beginning of November 2009], underscoring the potential for damage from weather-related disasters, which scientists say may become more frequent and more severe due to global warming.
Andean glaciers, which supply 70 million persons with water, have shrunk by 30 percent over the past three decades. These glaciers are likely to disappear by 2030.
Even though Latin America is in a position to meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goals for access to safe water, around 85 million persons in this region still lack a water connection to their homes and 110 million lack access to proper sewage. Almost 38,000 children die per year of intestinal diseases attributable to contaminated water.
Moreno’s presentation coincided with the opening of a food security summit of the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, where delegates are promoting the goal of increasing food production by 50 percent over the next 15 years. In December 2009, countries will discuss ways to tackle climate change in a UN summit in Copenhagen.
“In Latin America, all these issues converge around water,” Moreno said.
Comparative advantage
While water management poses huge challenges, this resource represents a competitive advantage for the Latin American and Caribbean economies, Moreno said. The region has 8 percent of the world’s population but holds 31 percent of its fresh water reserves. Water provides a full 68 percent of the electricity generated in the region, compared 16 percent on average in other parts of the globe.
“This hydro advantage does not manifest itself solely in electricity,” Moreno said. “We all know that Latin America is one of the world’s major producers of grains. Still, few understand that we have specialized in foods that require large quantities of water.”
The region contributes 60 percent of the global exports of soybeans, 51 percent of sugar exports and 50 percent of beef exports. Latin America has an enormous untapped potential to produce even more, since only one percent of its water resources are used for agricultural production, compared with 53 percent in the Middle East and North Africa.
The IDB is working with several governments to create climate change mitigation plans and help build infrastructure that can withstand more inclement weather.
But in the short term, Moreno called for a renewed effort to close the gap in the water and sanitation coverage. “The question today is not how we are going to guarantee these services to 100 percent of the population,” he said, “but how long we are going to take to get it done.”
Moreno said cities like Monterrey in Mexico, Medellin in Colombia, Montero in Bolivia and Sao Paulo in Brazil produced successful models that showed that public, private and mixed capital operators have come up with innovative ways to improve water access sustainably.
“Some say that there are only mutually exclusive alternatives in the water debate,” Moreno said. “Private sector versus public sector. Subsidies versus market prices.”
“At the IDB we do not share that polarized and conflictive view of water,” he added. “We have learned that, in this industry, success doesn’t depend on an ideological option or a specific business model.”
Moreno recognized that the investments needed to close the coverage gap exceed $50 billion. For this, the IDB in 2007 launched its Water and Sanitation initiative “to give the sector a boost.”
Spain’s historic gesture
Over the past three years, the IDB has approved more than $4 billion in financing for water and sanitation projects that have benefited at least 30 million persons. But much more is needed, Moreno said, adding that the Bank is establishing strategic alliances “at a scale that can change the dynamics of this sector.”
Moreno praised Spain, which in 2008 pledged to donate $1.5 billion for a fund to improve water and sanitation services for the poorest communities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Moreno thanked Spain for this “historic” gesture toward the region, and for joining forces with the IDB to use the fund to co-finance projects in 12 countries. To date, the IDB and Spain have jointly announced programs in Haiti, Bolivia and Paraguay. In all, Spain and the IDB will mobilize $620 million for projects that will benefit four million persons, of which $420 million is being contributed by Spain.
Moreno also thanked Mexico’s FEMSA Foundation, which has agreed to finance a program of prizes and scholarships for water and sanitation professionals in the region. During the IWA congress, Moreno and FEMSA CEO José Antonio Fernández Carvajal presented a new prize for outstanding water and sanitation operators in Latin America.
Related web sites:
See also: IDB fact sheet – Water: a threatened resource in Latin America and the Caribbean, 17 Nov 2009
Source: IDB, 16 Nov 2009
Scientists in Bolivia say that one of the country’s most famous glaciers has almost disappeared as a result of climate change. The Chacaltaya glacier, 5,300m up in the Andes, used to be the world’s highest ski run. But it has been reduced to just a few small pieces of ice.
Many Bolivians on the highland plains, and in two cities, depend on the melting of the glaciers for their water supply during the dry season.
The team of Bolivian scientists started measuring the Chacaltaya glacier in the 1990s. Not long ago they were predicting that it would survive until 2015. But now it seems, the glacier has melted at a much faster rate than they expected.
[...] Edson Ramirez, a scientist who has studied the region for years, says the significance of the melting glaciers goes way beyond tourism. As well as those living on the highland plains, two of Bolivia’s main cities, La Paz and El Alto, rely on the Andean glaciers for an important part of their drinking water.
The World Bank warned earlier this year that many of the Andes’ tropical glaciers will disappear within 20 years. This, the bank said, would both threaten the water supplies of nearly 80 million people living in the region, and jeopardise the future generation of hydropower. Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru depend on that power for about half their electricity.
Source: James Painter, BBC, 12 May 2009
Posted in Bolivia, Water resources management
Tagged climate change, glaciers, water shortage
Given the importance of the [water] issue for the region, the absence of Latin American heads of state at the World Water Forum that started in Turkey on Monday [16 March 2009] came as a surprise to organisers. There are Latin American representatives, but the forum will certainly miss the presence of at least some presidents, a forum official [said].
Heads of state from 11 countries held a private meeting on Monday [16 March 2009] to discuss challenges such as water security, climate adaptability and international solidarity through more strategic water use.
A study [entitled Climate Change and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, that was] recently released by the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Eclac) indicated that the region needs to implement preventive measures to reduce the impact of climate change as it could be more affected than other areas in the world.
The report criticized regional governments’ tendency to react instead of implementing preventive measure to avoid further damage caused by climate change and the unsustainable use of water resources.
Source: BNamericas [subscription site], 16 Mar 2009
Posted in Campaigns & events, Water resources management
Tagged climate change, World Water Forum
Chilean authorities are considering implementing tax breaks and financing projects to promote initiatives that combat the effects of climate change on [water] resources. The public works ministry (MOP) [in collaboration with other government agencies, is considering measures such as]: optimizing water use, treating wastewater to be reused, financing for industrial wastewater treatment and tax benefits for those that invest in innovative water projects.
[D]rought is [...] causing a decrease in agricultural production. [...] Less rainfall, the melting of glaciers, and the evaporation of lakes and reservoirs at a higher rate than usual are some of the issues being studied by authorities. MOP has been building reservoirs – both with public funds and through concessions – to supply the mining, agriculture and potable water industry in its dry northern area.
[...] President Michelle Bachelet’s government has prioritized investment in innovation, and that includes research programs to ensure the sustainability of the country’s water resources, a MOP official said, adding that these investments include studying technologies to build underground reservoirs and reduce evaporation.
Source: Eva Medalla, BNamericas [subscription site], 12 Mar 2009
Posted in Chile, Financing, Water resources management
Business News Americas – Water & Waste
