Conflicts Break Out in the Andes as Glaciers, and Their Water, Disappear

OxFam International has released a major study confirming that glacial shrinkage is deepening water conflicts in the Andes.

The numbers are stunning. Of the 218 ongoing and sometimes violent conflicts recorded by the People’s Defender of Peru as of February, 48 percent stemmed from environmental issues, many related to “problems with water management.”

The disappearance of glacial water supplies in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia is a growing problem. In the region as a whole, according to the World Bank, many of the glaciers could be entirely gone within 20 years.

OxFam's new accounting of the social conflicts in Peru should serve as a global warning as events such as the recent evaporation of Bolivia’s Chacaltaya Glacier bring Andean glacial disappearance into extremely sharp relief.

In recent years, Peru’s glaciers have shrunk by over 20 percent, sharply reducing water flow to the country’s coast, where the majority of the population resides.

The loss so far is equivalent to seven billion cubic meters of water, 10 years’ supply for Lima, a city with a population of roughly eight million people. The average amount of water available to those living on the Pacific slopes of the Andes is 2,000 cubic meters annually. Seventy percent of the population is concentrated there.
On the other side, the average water availability is a staggering 291,000 cubic meters annually—a 100:1 ratio

Focusing in on the Cordillera Blanca in Peru, which contains 26 percent of the world’s tropical glaciers, researcher Edward Sprang reports that the area covered by glaciers shrunk more than 15 percent in the last half of the 20th century.

The glaciers have an “integral impact on the runoff levels supplying downstream rivers by capturing and storing water as snow in the rainy season and releasing water as melted snow in the dry season," Sprang writes. "As a glacier decreases in size, its ability to provide this service decreases.”

The OxFam study highlights some of the largest ongoing water conflicts in the region.

One is the diversion of water from Lake Choclococha. Previously, it had been used for human consumption. Then a channel was built to divert the lake water, now employed in fields in desert-land in Ica province, growing export crops—asparagus, cotton. The affected communities, some of whom can no longer access this water source, haven’t been compensated.

In the northwest, the Chavimochic and Chinecas irrigation projects have similarly sparked conflicts over water resources. Chavimochic supplies water to around 155,000 hectares, also used primarily for agro-export. Nearly half of that land would be desert without the diverted water.

The report cites the primary reasons for many of the water conflicts as large hydro-projects, including water-transfer systems such as that used in Lake Choclococha; those that involve transferring water management from the state to private corporations, as in the Bolivian Water War; and the search for new sources of water in rural areas.

Compounding the water supply problem is water pollution.