A melting glacier, a fight for climate justice
Peruvian city threatened by potential rockslides, avalanches
THE CORDILLERA BLANCA, Peru — Once, this was where Saúl Luciano Lliuya came to find peace. The mountain’s pristine beauty ensured his livelihood as a guide; its steady stream of fresh water sustained his family farm. The everlasting ice that gleamed from its rugged crest spoke of a world in balance.
But on this May morning, Luciano Lliuya surveyed Nevado Palcaraju with his eyes narrowed, his forehead creased. The glacier was almost gone, transformed by rising temperatures from solid ice into a large, unstable lagoon. At any moment, an avalanche or rockslide could cause the turquoise meltwater to surge over its banks, hurtle down the mountainside and deluge the city of Huaraz, where he and some 120,000 others lived.
“Muy pensativo,” Luciano Lliuya described his mood in Spanish. Overthinking. Under pressure.
For seven years, Luciano Lliuya has waged a lawsuit against the German energy company RWE — part of a growing cohort of activists who have turned to the courts for climate justice as political solutions remain out of reach.
Citing scientific studies that link pollution from power plants to the retreat of Palcaraju’s glacier, Luciano Lliuya argues that the energy giant should help pay for measures to prevent a catastrophic flood. The company’s lawyers counter that all of its operations were legal, and that the link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate impacts is too complex for any single entity to be held responsible.
Now the court had com eto Peru to collect on-the-ground evidence — a global first for any climate case.
In the next few days, a cadre of German judges and technical experts would walk the streets of Huaraz and view the homes that could be inundated. They would ascend the rutted road to Palcaraju, examining the glacier from the very spot where Luciano Lliuya stood.
If the judges saw this place the way he saw it, if they were convinced by Luciano Lliuya’s claims, it would mark a breakthrough in the burgeoning realm of climate litigation. Success in Huaraz would mean that major polluters anywhere may be liable for the increasingly disastrous consequences of greenhouse gas emissions, experts say. It could pave the way for more lawsuits from developing nations that did little to cause climate change, but are bearing the brunt of its impacts. It might force rich countries and giant corporations to reconsider the risks of relying on fossil fuels, and empower those on the front lines of warming to seek restitution for what they have lost.
Luciano Lliuya looked again across the water, where the remains of Palcaraju glacier still clung to the cliffs above the lagoon. So much depended on that precarious balance: His livelihood. His home. Possibly even the planet.
Then there was a low rumble, and a puff of white billowed from the top of the glacier - an avalanche. It was minor, not powerful enough to even ruffle the surface of the lake. But the worry in Luciano Lliuya’s eyes deepened.
“Vamanos,” he said. “Let’s go.”
‘A flood that destroys everything’
In the cooler climate of a bygone era, the Palcaraju glacier resembled a river of ice. It flowed inexorably from the mountain’s crest, gouging a bowl-shaped basin out of the rock and pushing debris into a rubble pile called a moraine.
But as the planet warms, the glacier is retreating. A vast lake, dubbed Palcacocha, has formed in the empty basin. The moraine acts as a dam, stopping the water from spilling into the valley below.
For now.
An avalanche could touch off a disaster, according to a 2016 study that modeled how a glacial lake outburst flood at Laguna Palcacocha might unfold.
Rock and ice would tumble from the deteriorating glacier and weakened mountain slope, falling hundreds of feet before plunging into the deepest part of the lagoon.
The impact would send a massive wave rolling toward the opposite shore. As it reached shallower waters, the wave would grow taller, much the way a tsunami gets bigger as it approaches a beach.
By the time it crossed the lagoon, the wave from a large avalanche would loom 70 feet above the top of the moraine. Nearly 2 million cubic meters of water would go crashing down the mountainside. Soil, boulders and even trees would get mixed up in the flood, adding to its tremendous force. Within an hour, the torrent would arrive at the outskirts of Huaraz.
Some 50,000 people, including Luciano Lliuya, live in the high hazard zone on the banks of the Quilcay River. Here, the inundation would be intense enough to demolish the small brick and adobe homes.
“We are speaking about a flood that destroys everything” said Cesar Portocarrero, 75, a civil engineer from Huaraz who contributed to the 2016 study. “Not only inundates. Not only covers with water. It destroys everything in its path.”
A newly installed early warning system at the lagoon should set off sirens around the city, giving people about 20 minutes to evacuate. Anyone who doesn’t escape before the deluge hits would be unlikely to survive.
Those who make their homes near the Cordillera Blanca, the ice-capped “white range” that looms above Huaraz, have always recognized this risk. To dwell in the shadow of Peru’s tallest mountains is to live with the possibility of disaster. The region boasts Earth’s largest concentration of tropical glaciers - high-altitude ice masses that are unpredictable at the best of times, but have become increasingly fragile as the planet warms.
In 1941, a glacial lake outburst flood from Palcacocha killed an estimated 1,800 people - about one third of Huaraz’s residents at the time. Survivors recall seeing trees slam into houses like battering rams, blasting holes in walls of brick and stone. The path of destruction extended all the way to the coast, 100 miles away.
A few years later, a flood above the nearby archaeological site of Chavín de Huántar killed 500 people and demolished millennia-old artifacts. Then another outburst wiped out a newly built hydroelectric station. In 1970, an earthquake destabilized the glacier on Peru’s tallest mountain, unleashing an avalanche that engulfed the entire city of Yungay. Some 20,000 people were buried. Just 400 residents survived.
The crises helped push Peru’s government to establish a federal glaciology unit that would shore up the country’s most dangerous glacial lakes.
“We were the pioneers in the world,” said Portocarrero, a former director of the unit who helped build the security system at Laguna Palcacocha in 1973.
Portocarrero described how workers dug drainage channels to empty som e of the water from the lagoon and bolstered the moraine with two 20-foot-high stonecovered dams. By creating about 25 feet of “freeboard” between the water surface and the top of the dam, the measures reduced the chance of an overflow.
As decades passed without another deadly outburst, disasters like the 1941 flood faded into distant memory. In 1996, during a period of “decentralization,” Peru disbanded its federal glaciology unit. Its responsibilities were shifted to the regional governments, though they rarely had the resources or expertise to address dangerous lakes.
At the time, few in Huaraz worried about the change. They believed that Palcacocha was already under control. They thought they were safe.
Loss and damage
In 2009, scientists working on a new underwater map of Laguna Palcacocha made a terrifying discovery: Since the security system was first installed, the lake had swelled to 34 times its former volume. It was now even bigger than it had been before the 1941 disaster.
Although the drainage system prevented the water level from rising too high, the glacier’s retreat allowed the lagoon to become much longer, creating potential runway for a massive wave. If a major avalanche occurred, the dams would not be able to hold back the swollen lake.
Peru’s president declared a state of emergency at the lagoon. The regional government built several large plastic pipes to siphon off extra water, lowering the surface level by less than 15 feet. Official “guardians” were paid to live on the mountain and monitor the lake aroundthe-clock, and an early warning system was installed to enable evacuations of the communities below. A new road - rugged but navigable allowed for more frequent checks on the growing hazard.
Luciano Lliuya was not assuaged.
His neighborhood, Nueva Florida, had been wrecked during the 1941 flood. Afterward, officials wanted to prevent people from rebuilding there, arguing it was unsafe. But they could not stop a surge of impoverished settlers — including Luciano Lliuya’s parents — who came from the countryside in search of the jobs a city could provide. Now there were more people than ever living in harm’s way, many of them in informal houses constructed without regard for building codes.
Living in Huaraz allowed Luciano Lliuya to attend school and enroll in a rigorous training program to become a certified mountain guide. It meant he could earn enough to send his son to college and renovate the house his parents had constructed.
But at any moment, Luciano Lliuya knew, another flood could hit, obliterating the life he’d built.
Luciano Lliuya was just as anxious about the slowmotion disasters of heat and drought, which threatened his guiding business and the small family farm where he still cultivated corn, potatoes and wheat. The shimmering ice that gave the Cordillera Blanca its name grew more unstable with each passing season. The land that had yielded an abundant harvest for his parents was becoming parched and meager.
“Ia m really worried,” he said. “As a guide, as a farmer and as a citizen.”
Portocarrero shared Luciano Lliuya’s concerns. In 2016 the engineer came out of retirement to help draft a proposal to partially drain the Palcacocha lagoon. For about $4 million, he said, officials could reinforce the dam, lower the lake level by an additional 65 feet and redirect the water into a secure reservoir that would supply the area’s people and farms. Studies showed that the project would curb the risk of an outburst and almost halve the size of the high-hazard zone if a flood did occur.
But officials in the Ancash regional government said they didn’t have the funds for such an ambitious project. Melvin Grimaldo Rodriguez Minchola, its director of natural resources and environmental management, detailed the area’s many other problems: A struggling economy, deteriorating roads, poor and ailing citizens. Not to mention the climate-induced crises of drought, forest loss and at least 50 other potentially dangerous glacial lakes in the Cordillera Blanca.
“We have just a few resources to deal with all these challenges,” Rodriguez Minchola said in a recent interview at his office in Huaraz. “We are handling [the flood risk] as best we can.”
Portocarrero questioned that claim. Ancash’s gold, copper and zinc mines make it one of Peru’s wealthiest regions. The government could invest in the project if it wanted, he said - but corruption, dysfunction and decentralization have gotten in the way.
Yet he and Rodriguez Minchola agreed on one thing: It seemed fundamentally unfair that those least responsible for the climate crisis were forced to cope with its worst impacts on their own.
Peru contributed less than 0.4 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, yet it consistently ranks among the nations at high risk from climate damages. The country’s glaciers have lost about half of their surface area in the last half century. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced by extreme rainfall amplified by warming. Rising temperatures have brought agricultural pests to ever higher elevations, imperiling crops that rural communities need to survive.
And because countries like Peru didn’t become rich from burning fossil fuels over the last 150 years, they have few resources to cope with the dangers they now face. They struggle to implement measures, such as the Palcacocha drainage project, that could save lives and livelihoods. If tragedy does occur - a drought destroys an entire year’s harvest, a flood devastates a city - they are less able to recover.
At international climate talks, low-income countries have sought help for adaptation and “loss and damage” the unavoidable, irreversible harms caused by climate change - even as they push major emitters to curb their pollution.
It’s been an uphill battle on all fronts. Money available through U.N.-administered funds, which depend on donations, is dwarfed by the scale of developing nations’ need. Wealthy countries including the United States have resisted any kind of financial commitment to assist with loss and damage, worried that it would imply legal liability for climate change’s escalating toll.
Meanwhile, global emissions keep rising, and the impacts only grow worse.
Luciano Lliuya often wondered if those responsible for warming the planet would ever be held accountable for the consequences. The big emitters had all the wealth and power, while the people suffering the most from climate disasters possessed only the moral high ground.
“Imagine the Peruvian government making demands of Germany,” he said. “That would be so crazy.”
And a single Peruvian trying to demand change? That would be even more crazy, he said. Practically impossible.
“We don’t care about the money that the case of Luciano Lliuya could earn. What we care most is about stopping the climate change. Because that is what causes the most damage.”