Bolivia water crisis looms as glacier melts away
Tom Clifford, Foreign Correspondent LA PAZ // The Bolivian capital and its twin city of El Alto are facing a water crisis this year, a leading climatologist says. Demand for water is likely to exceed supply in 2009, with the entire Chacaltaya glacier, which supplies nearly two million people, set to disappear within 12 months, said Edson Ramirez, a hydrologist at San Andres University in La Paz. “Glaciers have a double function; they reflect the sun’s rays, keeping the earth cool, and act as the world’s water towers. More than 70 per cent of the world’s fresh water is stored in glacial ice,” Mr Ramirez said. “In 1989 we had estimated that this glacier would last 15 years or more. Now we can see that the glacier has practically disappeared already.” At his cramped office in the southern zone of La Paz where he has spent years studying satellite imagery tracing the Chacaltaya glacier’s decline, Mr Ramirez outlined a grim future. “It’s almost gone,” he said, pointing to a diagram charting the glacier’s recession over five-year stages from 1980. The Chacaltaya waters serve not only most of El Alto’s 800,000 residents, but 60 per cent of La Paz’s one million residents as well.
