Climate change affecting Ecuador’s glaciers

QUITO: Ecuador could lose two of its seven glaciers over the next few years thanks to global warming, a phenomenon that worries experts because it would alter the paramo ecosystem and its effect on the nation’s water supply and humidity, media reported. The most imminent threat concerns the glaciers of Carihuairazo, in Chimborazo province, and the southern Iliniza, between those of Pichincha and Cotopaxi. “Global estimates forecast a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees C (3 degrees F), a pattern that will not change in the next 12 years,” Estefania Avalos, undersecretary of Climate Change at the Environment Ministry of Ecuador (MAE), told Efe. —IANS