- A community of alpaca farmers in the high Peruvian Andes is witnessing the loss of its mountain glaciers as a result of a warming climate and unseasonal droughts.
- In response, community members have turned to an ancestral practice of harvesting rainwater runoff and snowmelt, caching it in artificial lagoons that they can then tap to irrigate their alpaca pastures.
- Today, the community of Santa Fe, on the slopes of Mount Rit’ipata, has 41 of these lagoons, or qocha, but increasingly prolonged droughts mean it will need many more.
- Other communities across Peru have launched similar water harvesting initiatives, and while the government backs these projects, communities like Santa Fe are ineligible for state funding under a 2022 regulation.
In Ayacucho province in Peru’s southern Andes, a three-hour drive from the provincial capital, Huamanga, stands the snowcapped mountain of Rit’ipata, popular among tourists. Every January, high summer in the Southern Hemisphere, groups of young people climb its peak to take photos and play in the snow. But what they don’t know is that the ice they walk on is only temporary.
“The most constant snow we saw was in 2005, and only in the highest part [of the mountain],” says Tulia García, director of the Center for Agricultural Development (CEDAP), a sustainable development NGO that works with rural communities in the area. “What remains here is ice that will melt in a few weeks.”
Rit’ipata is part of the Chonta range of the Andes, one of 18 mountain ranges in Peru that together are home to 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers. Its name in Quechua means “snow summit,” though this is no longer the case: a study published in 2020 by the National Institute for Research on Glaciers and Mountain Ecosystems (INAIGEM) showed that the mountain range had lost 95% of its snowcap.
Jesús Gómez López, director of glacier research at INAIGEM, says high temperatures resulting from climate change have caused the disappearance of more than half of Peru’s glacier surface in just 54 years. According to Gómez López, this process is irreversible; his studies estimate that the icy crown atop the Chonta range, including on Rit’ipata, will be gone forever in about 10 years.
“The population living around snow-covered mountains are the first to feel the effects of deglaciation due to the reductions in water. We need to adapt to these changes, which means conserving our basin headwaters,” Gómez López says.
Santa Fe community members have suffered from an intensifying shortage of water. Since 2004, they’ve conserved water using their ancestral Indigenous knowledge of qocha, the Quechua name for an artificially fenced lagoon. Image courtesy of @mullu.tv.
The alpaca farmers who live in the communities here know that the disappearance of snow from the mountain is due to global warming. Older community members attribute it to Rit’ipata’s sadness that people have stopped making offerings to the apu,