The boom there has pumped a lot of money into the economy, but it’s also pumped out a lot of water.

Ica is a small, modest city near the Peruvian coast. But on a recent night, the city’s downtown plaza is hopping, including a small religious parade.

Click to enlarge (Illustration: Manya Gupta)

The bustle is largely due to asparagus. Ica is Peru’s asparagus capital. And the overseas demand for the long green spears has turned the place into a boomtown.

Locals say unemployment is near zero. Poverty has been cut in half. And there are unheard of amenities.

“There are now movie theaters as of only four or five years ago,” says Cecilia Blume. “And another thing that’s super important to me is the social revolution. There isn’t childhood malnutrition. Because in Ica, there’s work now for women – in agricultural packing.”

Blume grew up here and now runs a consulting company that works with asparagus exporters. And she and others in the business chalk almost all of this progress up to asparagus. But the picture here in Ica isn’t totally rosy.

Manuel Checa drives me straight up to the top of a sand dune high above the Ica Valley. Checa is part-owner of an agro-export group called Athos. They grow asparagus and pomegranates on about 1,200 acres of land.

He stops the car and points to some of the blocks of green that stretch out below us.

“This asparagus is 17 years old,” Checa says, “and it has produced very well. But now, we’ve killed 20 percent of our asparagus, and this year we’re killing 20 percent more.”

Checa’s company is pulling back from asparagus, after two decades of growing more and more of it.

“It’s causing a water problem,” he says. “We have to change crops.”

That’s because asparagus is a thirsty crop. And this part of Peru, along the coast, is basically a desert. The climate is great for farming, but the only water here comes when rains high up in the Andes wash through on their way to the sea.

That feeds local rivers and replenishes underground aquifers. There’s always been agriculture along these rivers. But never like today.

“The agro-exporters starting from 1995 intensively were overdrafting the aquifer, pumping water up and out,” said David Bayer, a local water activist who first came to Peru in 1964.

He says the Peruvian government, with the support of the US and the World Bank, pushed asparagus cultivation for export, irrigated with water pumped up from the aquifer, for only the cost of building and operating wells. Basically free water.

“And they also took over the equivalent, in the case of the Ica Valley, the equivalent of virtually 40 percent, 45 percent of the land,” Bayer says.

Over time, all that irrigation has caused the aquifer to drop lower and lower. That’s made it tough going for some bigger growers like Athos. And it’s become even tougher for small-scale farmers.

Dominga Rosario owns a patch of land in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Ica. She’s one of thousands of local residents here who farm mostly to feed their families.

She points out her corn, mango, avocado – they’re a little yellow right now. She’ll get a decent crop, Rosario says, but “you have to irrigate more. You have to invest more.”

That’s because as the aquifer has dropped, the soil above it has become drier. But irrigation can be expensive, especially when farmers have to keep digging deeper and deeper wells. Some can’t afford it. And they’ve abandoned their crops. The city of Ica’s municipal drinking water supply could even be at risk.

“I think there needs to be a solution as soon as possible,” Rosario says. “Because these companies, they’re preying on the aquifer. And when the aquifer dries up, our future will be uncertain!”

The situation has gotten so dire that it’s set off a scramble for solutions. For some, the answer to the water shortage is simple: just get more water.

Alfredo Sotil manages a commission that represents big agro-exporters here. He says that in the rainy season, as much as half the water running off the mountains flows into the sea. He and his colleagues want to capture that runoff behind new dams. “We’re interested in taking water and transferring it here, to continue generating this development,” Sotil says.

The dams could have the added benefit of generating electricity. But huge dams and water diversions are expensive, and they can cause their own environmental problems. That’s why others here are focusing not on getting more water but on using less.

Miguel Betín grows asparagus and pomegranates on a farm close to the Ica Valley. He recently installed a new, super-high-tech drip irrigation system designed by an Israeli expat who lives nearby.

“It works better than what we thought,” Betín says.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We were thinking we were going to save 40 percent water in the first year, and we saved 70,” he says.

Betín says his asparagus is just as good as the crop grown with conventional drip irrigation. And he says if the other growers in the region copy him, it could make a huge difference.

“If only the asparagus growers change, you’d save like 70 million cubic meters a year. So you have a big part of the problem solved there,” he says.

As for activist David Bayer, he thinks more farmers should follow the example of Manuel Checa: just stop growing water-hungry crops like asparagus. Or at least cut back on them. And he thinks some land should be taken out of production altogether for a while, to let the aquifer recharge.

Of course most growers aren’t interested in killing their golden cash crop. And the Peruvian government? It’s taken halting steps toward addressing the water crisis here. But some Peruvians say big changes may only come through pressure from a more formidable force: international consumers.

Stefan Bederski runs an organic farm about two hours from Ica. He says all the positive changes in agriculture in Peru recently – from better pay and working conditions to stronger environmental controls – all of them have come largely through pressure from overseas markets, especially in Europe.

“They have been really the ones who have forced the Peruvian agriculture and the companies to do the things right,” Bederski says. “We do have our own local laws and national laws, but there is no force to make them happen.”

Bederski thinks it might well be the same with the overuse of Peru’s water, that it’s the consumers overseas who will make the difference.

An international coalition of nonprofits is already trying to make that possible. They’re developing water use standards for Peru and around the world that will be like fair trade standards.

They say the effort will help consumers in Europe and the US learn more about the water impact of the asparagus and other imported produce at their local store, so they can choose products that don’t take a big gulp from someone else’s nearly depleted cup.

Skeleton of a young man found at Machu Picchu (Photo: Mattia Cabitza)

A century ago, an American scholar led an expedition that collected artifacts and ancient bones from a mountaintop high in the Andes.

50,000 pieces in all – including human skeletons – were taken from the Incan city of Machu Picchu.

They’ve been kept at Yale University since then.

Now, they’re being returned to Peru. A repatriation ceremony was held Thursday in a Peruvian city where the bones and artifacts will now be kept.

More Pictures of Peruvian Artifacts at BBC Mundo

The city we want you to name was once the cultural capital of the Incan Empire.

Ceramics on display at the Casa Concha (Photo: Mattia Cabitza)

In an ICP research field near the Andean mountain town of Huancayo, a group of local men and women rip into a patch of dark soil and yank up tubers in a shocking array of colors. The edible roots range from fuchsia to dark orange to a light yellow that fades all the way to dark purple, and they’re among the 700 hundred or so varieties of indigenous Peruvian crops known as oca, olluco and mashua.

Peru has one of the most varied food cultures in the world, with highly diverse growing regions from here in the Andes to the Amazon rainforest in the east and the Pacific coast in the west. And if you’re a foodie, you might have noticed that Peruvian cuisine is suddenly all the rage in the United States.

Not long ago, many of the country’s indigenous crops were falling out of favor. But that trend is being reversed by the hand-in-glove work of Peruvian chefs and ICP researchers like Ivan Manrique.

Manrique and his colleagues grow once widely-distributed Andean crops in research plots here in Huancayo, and then analyze them in the lab.

“We’ve done DNA studies,” Manrique says, “and we’ve found that each one is different.”

Some crop varieties are high in proteins or antioxidants, Manrique says, others in vitamins or medicinal properties. Some, he says, even contain chemical compounds that haven’t been found in any other species in the world.

That’s important because as in much of the rest of the world, agriculture in Peru is facing big challenges from temperature and rain swings as a result of climate change. Many of the ancient crops being studied here are hardy ones that grow in tough conditions.

Manrique points to a bulbous root called maca as an example of a hearty and highly valuable crop. For hundreds of years, he says, it was valued as a high-energy food. Incan warriors even carried it with them on trips to expand their empire.

Manrique says it’s also exceptional because it grows at altitudes at about 4500 meters above sea level, where no other crop can prosper. It’s also very nutritious, Manrique says, and has recently been shown to improve libido and fertility in men.

It’s that last quality that’s helped save it, Manrique says. Twenty years ago, maca was on the verge of extinction, but today, it’s grown on more than 5,000 acres in Peru.

The ICP’s goal is to save as much more of Peru’s rich crop biodiversity as possible.

Meanwhile, down from the mountains in Lima, the effort is getting help from the man who just might be the most popular Peruvian alive today—Gaston Acurio.

Acurio is a chef and entrepreneur, with dozens of restaurants here in Peru and around the world and a cooking show on TV.

His flagship restaurant in Lima, called Astrid y Gaston, was recently named one of the top 50 in the world. Until a few years ago, Acurio says, it leaned French, because Peruvians felt they were a third world country that had to import culture from Europe.

But one day, he says, “we discovered we have a very rich cultural diversity.”

For Acurio, it was an epiphany.

“We understood that as cooks we have a big glorious responsibility of representing our biodiversity and our culture with what we are doing, which is cooking.”

So Acurio basically invented what’s known as Novo-Andina cuisine—traditional Peruvian flavors, presented in new and exciting ways.

Within only a few years, Novo-Andina took Peru – and the world – by storm. And the demand for Peruvian crops took off. Consumption of native potatoes, for instance, increased 50-fold here between 2005 and 2010.

“That’s cooks, that’s my generation,” Acurio says. “We did that.”

And the appetite for native Peruvian foods didn’t stop with potatoes. Acurio points to a native fruit called the camu camu as another example.

“This fruit camu camu was all the time in the Amazon,” he says, “but nobody knew of it in Lima. So as cooks we started to tell the customers about this product. And now you can see camu camu in the supermarkets, in yoghurts, in every bar there are sours with camu camu.”

Of course there are some native foods that Peruvians haven’t yet embraced.

The grain quinoa, for instance—it’s all the rage in places in the US, but it can be hard to find in restaurants in Lima, because many here consider it a poor man’s food.

Like Ivan Manrique at the International Center for the Potato, Gaston Acurio believes changing that mindset will help preserve Peru’s food biodiversity for the future. And he relishes the challenge.

“The great thing is we’re just starting this story,” Acurio says. “It’s just the beginning.

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Rancher Kip Farmer navigates his truck over rocky dirt roads in the mountains of Western Colorado. Farmer grew up tending his family’s flocks up here, living for weeks at a time in tents and old trailers out on the range. But he’s one of few Americans to have any experience with this work.

“It’s seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” Farmer says. “None of the locals really would want to put in that kind of time and be tied down every day that many hours a day doing a job up away from family and friends.”

So instead, Farmer employs around a dozen Peruvian sheep herders on temporary work visas.

As we come down a steep hill, he runs into one of his men and stops to check in. Farmer tells the worker he’s left a crate of border collie puppies at the man’s trailer, to help tend the flock.

The government requires US ranchers to provide housing, food and a minimum wage of $750/mo. for their foreign herders. Often the housing is in trailers like these, situated near the flocks. (Photo: Megan Verlee)

“When I get back to town today, I’ll probably send four or five different Western Unions back to Peru,” he says. “The ones that have families generally will send $500 or $600 of it home every month.”

Most of Farmer’s herders have worked with him for ages, and Farmer says he doesn’t have any trouble convincing them to renew their visas every three years.

“Employees we have are making a lot more money with us than they would be back home,” Farmer says. “So they’re bringing resources back to their home country that wouldn’t be there otherwise.”

For years, though, immigration rights activists have argued the conditions herders put up with aren’t worth the money they’re paid. They say some ranchers take advantage of their workers, denying them medical care, taking improper deductions from their paychecks, and generally making an already difficult job even more lonely and isolating than it has to be.

Spanish Professor Thomas Acker is one of those fighting for a higher wage and more oversight of working conditions.

“We’re expecting these workers to be treated much more poorly than any American would be treated,” Acker says. “And the only reason it’s going on is because nobody’s looking.”

Acker doesn’t just want the US government to keep a closer eye on the welfare of immigrant sheep herders. He says their home countries haven’t been careful enough about looking out for their citizens.

“What we would also like to see is an agency or an entity, somebody that would be watching out for the workers’ welfare, when they’re signing up for these contracts and making sure they understand what they’re getting into before they come over here,” Acker says.

Worker advocates contend some ranchers take advantage of their workers - denying them medical care, and providing them with sub-standard food and housing - making an already difficult job even more lonely and isolating. (Photo: Megan Verlee)

“When they come with the owner of the ranch here to renew the passport or whatever, we also invite them here just to know, how the treatment is at the ranch, what is happening with them, if they’re happy etc.,” Devescovi says.

Devescovi says he’s had good luck taking problems to the industry groups that handle most herder visas. But still a lot of problems slip through the cracks.

Professor Thomas Acker spends a lot of time driving around the Colorado range to talk with workers with the help of a Chilean former herder named Ignacio Alvarado.

On one recent afternoon, they run into a man they’ve met before at work in a field. They hail him over to the truck and offer him a cold soda and a bit of conversation. The worker doesn’t want to give his name because he’s scared his employer will be angry if he talks to a reporter, but he does want Acker and Alvarado’s help.

Asked about his life on the range, the man says he doesn’t have any insurance and the rancher he works for is reluctant to take him to the doctor when he’s sick or to listen to his concerns.

“We help our employer,” the worker says, “so he should take care of us if we get sick or if we have other problems.”

Life is hard in the United States, the man says, but for a decade I’ve applied for visa after visa to come back for one reason: his family and his sons.

As hard as his life is here, this herder believes he’s providing a better one for loved ones at home. For the ranching industry, the fact that most herders renew their visas over and over is proof the system benefits both sides. But advocates for the herders say merely being better than the options back home, shouldn’t be good enough for the United States.

And then, after four hypnotic hours, you’ve arrived – at a patch of sparse farmland near the town of Pomacocha, at 13,000 feet an outpost at pretty much the upper limits of agriculture.

For centuries, Pomacocha’s thousand or so residents have grown corn in the fertile valleys below the town and potatoes on slopes that push against the sky above, fed by seasonal rains and glacial streams.

But climate change is hitting the high Andes hard. Temperature and precipitation swings are becoming more extreme, the glaciers are shrinking fast, and a tough place to farm is becoming even tougher.

So to help them deal with an uncertain future, residents are looking back in time—to before the arrival of Europeans.

From a field of brown soil, Pomacocha resident Mariano Ccaccya unearths a small, pink potato—a huaña, one of the first to be grown here in decades. The huaña is the native potato in this part of Peru, but Ccaccya says it had fallen out of favor in recent decades and was about to disappear.

Huaña are bitter, Ccaccya says, and it takes a lot of work to make them palatable. But he says there are good reasons to grow them in times of increasing uncertainty.

Ccaccya, who’s the local head of a nonprofit group that’s leading an effort to revive ancient Andean crops, says huañas can be stored for two or three years, more than four times as long as most other potatoes. Ccaccya’s colleague Adripino Jayo says huañas also resist frost, hail, extreme rain and drought.

“It’s very, very strong,” Jayo says. “Now that we’re in the crisis of climate change, it’s worth recovering these potatoes.”

Others think so too. Jayo and Ccaccya’s organization, Cusichaca Andina, recently won a grant from the World Bank to further its efforts to promote a variety of resilient ancient Andean crops, including quinoa, amaranth, and different types of potatoes and squashes.

But changing what’s grown here is only part of the plan. Cusichaca Andina is also looking to the past to try to change how crops are grown.

On a steep slope in a valley about two hours from the potato fields, Jayo pulls away a stand of brush to reveal an overgrown rock wall. He says the stones are part of a long-abandoned system of agricultural terraces, built into Peru’s mountains by the Incas more than 500 years ago.

Terraces like these once blanketed thousands of square miles of the Andes, and were described in the 17th century book The Royal Commentaries of the Incas, by Garcilaso de la Vega.

“They built level terraces on the mountains and hillsides, wherever the soil was good,” De la Vega wrote. “And these are to be seen today in Cusco and in the whole of Peru.”

Just a small fraction of the terraces are still used today. After the European conquest, Spanish crops and agricultural systems largely displaced traditional ones.

But here in Pomacocha, old terraces are being restored, and new ones are being built.

Ccaccya says they have a lot of benefits. The terraces help channel water for irrigation while avoiding erosion. They can hold water for months, which is crucial in a place with only intermittent access to water. And plants grown on them are more productive, he says.

Cusichaca Andina is also working on reviving another ancient technology for holding and transporting scarce water—Incan irrigation systems that Garcilaso de la Vega called “extraordinary.”

“The Cisterns, or Conservatories, were about twelve foot deep, in channels made of hewn stone,” de la Vega wrote, “and rammed in with earth so hard, that no water could pass between… But the Spaniards little regarded the convenience of these works, but rather out of a scornful and disdaining humor, have suffered them unto ruin, beyond all recovery.”

Centuries later, the digging and hammering of a handful of men near Pomacocha suggests that the ruin of the Incan irrigation channels was perhaps not quite beyond all recovery. The workers are chiseling and lining up stones along a long-abandoned canal once used to divert water from a nearby spring.

“It’s always been here,” Jayo says, pointing at the stone canal. “It’s probably from pre-Incan times, but it’s still useful for irrigation, with a little help.”

Cusichaca Andina and other groups in the Andes have recovered these and other ancient agricultural treasures through a combination of archaeology and exploring local traditions. And they’re teaching communities throughout the Peruvian high Andes how to rebuild and use them, along with other ancient agricultural techniques.

It’s all part of an effort to increase the resilience and food security.

But the leaders of Cusichaca Andina realize they can only make a small dent in a vast need. Jayo says the Peruvian government has a big role to play as well.

“We see the difficulties in the national context,” Jayo says. He says the group wants politicians in Lima to apply what it’s doing across all of the Andes.

So far national politicians haven’t picked up that slack.

But the work here may have relevance to mountainous regions beyond Peru. For instance Cusichaca Andina’s founder, British archaeologist Ann Kendall, recently traveled to China. The world’s largest country faces huge challenges from climate change and water shortages. And it also happens to have its own system of ancient mountain terraces that Kendall thinks may just be waiting to be revived.

Lake Titicaca is the answer to the Geo Quiz. It is located high in the Andes on the border of Peru and Bolivia ans is a couple of hours away from the Bolivian city of La Paz. The lake faces serious environmental issues including pollution and over-fishing and receding water levels. Anchor Marco Werman talks to BBC’s Mattia Cabitza who visited the lake.

Peruvians vote Sunday, June 5th, in one of the most contentious elections in decades. Two populist candidates from opposite ends of the political spectrum have made it through to the second round run-off.

One is Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of an imprisoned former president, Alberto Fujimori. The other is former army officer Ollanta Humala, a one-time protégé of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. The election comes as Peru’s economy is booming, but many Peruvians feel left out of the boom.

Cesar Cruz, a Lima taxi driver, said Peruvians have the choice of “voting for their wallet or their conscience.”

He said a vote for your wallet means voting for Keiko Fujimori because she’ll keep the doors open to foreign investors. Voting for your conscience, he said, means Ollanta Humala, though Humala scares people who think he’s too close to Hugo Chavez.

Cruz himself said he plans to vote for Humala. He said he lived through the abuses and corruption of the Alberto Fujimori years of the 1990s, and he could never vote for daughter.

Supporters of Keiko Fujimori have other memories of the Albert Fujimori era. They remember the soup kitchens and low-cost housing programs of her father’s presidency. The right-wing Keiko Fujimori commands support among many of Peru’s poor. She’s also popular for her zero-tolerance stance on crime. Fujimori’s been campaigning with an American with crime-fighting credentials, Rudy Giuliani.

“The main problem for everybody is security,” Fujimori said. “To fight delinquency, we have brought Mayor Giuliani in order to strengthen our proposal.”

But Fujimori has her detractors. Alvaro Vargas Llosa, the son of the Nobel Laureate Maria Vargas Llosa, said Fujimori would be a return to the bad old days of her father. Alberto Fujimori is currently serving a 25 year sentence, after being linked to death squads in the 1990s

“Her conduct in these last 10 years, her conduct during the dictatorship, the people that surround her and the stance that she and those people have taken on every single issue having to do with to what happened in the 1990s,” Vargas Llosa said, “all of that points to Alberto Fujimori making the big decisions and governing eventually if they win, through her.”

Ollanta Humala

Humala has been trying to dispel that image on the campaign trail.

“If they looked at what we’re proposing, they’d realize that we are not a threat. We want to consolidate the Peruvian economy but we want economic growth that’s inclusive and that solves the grave social problems we have in this country of poverty, extreme poverty and inequality,” he said.

In the end, though, Peruvians like Pilar, a college student who studies business administration and law, say either candidate would have a hard time solving the country’s entrenched problems.

“I really believe that Peru needs a change,” Pilar said. “It’s obvious that continuing down the same track is not working. There’s growth and there’s supposed to be trickle-down, but where is it trickling down to? It’s not reaching the places that really need it.”

Mount Hualcan, about 20,000 feet above sea level.

I’m traveling the world in search of the human face of the impacts of climate change. I encountered a sobering example yesterday, in Carhuaz, Peru. There, I met Juana, a middle-aged woman dressed in a white embroidered shirt, orange skirt and a grey felt hat.

One Sunday morning in April 2010 Juana puttered around the rustic house she rented by a stream on the outskirts of Carhuaz, at the base of Peru’s Cordillera Blanca range. The day, like every Sunday in Carhuaz [pronounced car-WHAS], a bustling town of 60,000, was market day.

Juana lot all of her possessions to a flood in April, 2010.

At around 8:00, the house began to shake. Juana rushed out the rough-hewn wooden door and climbed to higher ground. Her adobe hut had been built within a few yards of the stream where, normally, a gentle current had swirled around rounded boulders. On this day the creek had become a wild torrent, not just of water, but of tree trunks and boulders – huge boulders, some taller than her daughter.

As Juana told me her story in her native Quechua, through an interpreter, tears poured from her eyes. She said that as she watched from above, the flood took all her possessions, including her prized farm animals. Now she lives in a former stable. She makes a meager living washing clothes. Sometimes neighbors offer her gifts of a few potatoes or other crops they grow.

César Portocarrero told me the flood should never have happened, but that it could happen again. Portocarrero, a glaciologist and civil engineer, works for Peru’s National Water Agency, which, among other things, oversees public works to prevent floods.

About two decades ago ago Portocarrero himself oversaw construction of a drainage tunnel that was designed to protect Carhuaz from such floods. He blasted the drain in stone just below the summit of Mount Haulcan [pronounced waal-KAHN], a 20,000-foot-high peak that glistens above Carhuaz.

César Portocarrero, of Peru's National Water Agency, standing in front of one of his drainage tunnels.

In 1970, the entire town of nearby Yunguay, including 80,000 inhabitants, had been buried by just such a flood. The drain that Portocarrero built was designed to keep Laguna 513 at a constant level, about 60 feet below its banks. Thus, the basin became like a huge bathtub large enough so even the most ample bather couldn’t splash the floor.

Portocarrero says when he built the Laguna 513 drain he calculated that it’s basin would keep almost any imaginable icefall contained. But as Peru’s glaciers have retreated, the frequency and size of ice avalanches has increased. The April 2010 flood was caused when a 15 million cubic foot chunk of ice broke off the summit, tearing additional ice and rock as it tumbled. By the time it had reached Laguna 513 the volume had doubled.

The basin was big enough to fit the debris without overflowing; still the force of the fast-moving icefall created a splash so big that a wave washed completely over lake’s 60-foot containment banks. The water that escaped raced down the course of the normally quiescent outflow stream, ripping up boulders and trees and everything else it overtook.

Portocarrero estimates that due to global warming his drainage tunnel now only protects Carhuaz against about 80 percent of Hualcan’s icefalls. Fortunately, the 2010 flood stayed contained in the banks of the stream, taking no lives and causing little economic damage other than to Juana. Of Janua he says, sadly, she probably broke the law by living too close to the stream.

On the other hand a more powerful flood could happen any time, with much more severe results. A larger icefall could create a flood that would leap over the river’s banks, and cause much more damage or even loss of life. . His agency has produced a feasibility study with several proposals for how to defend the town better. But so far, says Portocarrero, there is no budget to build anything.

Daniel Grossman reports on climate change for The World. His multimedia work on science and the environment has been featured on PRI, NPR, National Geographic Online, The New York Times, Discover Magazine and Scientific American, among other outlets.

Benjamin Morales (photo: Daniel Grossman)

On May 31st 41 years ago Morales lunched near his home in the town of Yunguay. Despite protestations of friends who had joined him for the meal, he left just before 3 p.m. He had promised to drive his mother to another town. At 3:23, a powerful earthquake struck the region.

A massive piece of the Huascaran glacier that towered above Yunguay, broke loose and cascaded down a valley. The avalanche carried millions of tons of ice, dirt and rock, moving at nearly 200 miles per hour. Scientists later calculated that the debris flow contained about two billion cubic feet of material.

Where the valley channeling the flow took a turn, some of the debris leapt the banks and fell directly on top of Yunguay. Apart from a few lucky survivors who ran to high ground, the entire town of 18,000 was buried within seconds.

Morales told me no; that’s not why he’s so optimistic. He said that his long, successful career (he’s 76) has filled him with optimism that will power can overcome difficult challenges. To illustrate, he described a massive public works project he oversaw in the late 1970s. He directed construction of a humongous retaining wall to protect Peru’s largest hydroelectric power plant from the threat of a landslide.

The occasion of my chat with Morales was a visit to the Pastoriri glacier, about two-hours in a 4-wheel drive from the mountain city of Hauraz. Pastoriri was once a popular ski slope: Peru’s only.

Morales says more than 1,000 people visited Pastoriri some days. It attracted tourists from Peru and throughout the world. But about 10 years ago Peru’s Park Service decided that recession of the glacier it had noticed was caused by skiers.

The edge of the shrunken Postoriri glacier. (Photo: Daniel Grossman

Today the few visitors who drive the windy road to Pastoriri slog across about a mile of mud and gravel between where skiers used to hop onto the ice and where the glacier now begins. Although the exact amount of melting differs from place to place, virtually all of Peru’s glaciers are shrinking fast.

Morales conducted surveys of Peru’s glaciers in 1960s and 1990s. In the approximately 25-year interval, the country lost 22 percent of its ice. Morales says a new survey is urgently needed. A much smaller study he performed not long ago showed that glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca range had shrunk by 27 percent in 33 years.

Still, Morales believes that Pastoriri will attract crowds once again. He’s drafted a plan for a sort of climate-change theme park that he says could lure the tourists back. The focus of the development will be what he calls the Climate Change Route, a scenic and educational path winding past the glacier.

Morales says the area around Pastoriri could make a natural museum for teaching visitors about the many epochs of natural climate change of the past. For instance past ice ages plowed finely ground rock and gravel into linear piles known as moraines, clearly visible below the glacier today. Visitors could learn about climate changes deep in Earth’s past.

The recession of Pastoriri has revealed dinosaur footprints dating back to a glacier-free epoch much warmer than today. Most importantly though visitors who follow Morales’ Climate Change Route will learn about man-made climate change and the Pastoriri glacier that once was. Morales says all the plans for the exhibit are in place. “All we need now is the dough.”

Daniel Grossman reports on climate change for The World. His multimedia work on science and the environment has been featured on PRI, NPR, National Geographic Online, The New York Times, Discover Magazine and Scientific American, among other outlets.

Martín Mendieta has waited nearly 40 years to have running water.

Today I learned that the slogan is neither; for hundreds of thousands, if not millions (the numbers are in dispute), of Lima’s poorest inhabitants have either no running water at all or supplies that flow only a fraction of the day.

My day began early, in the San Martín district, a shantytown at Lima’s northern edge. There I met Martín Mendieta, a long-time inhabitant of the Cerro Candelario neighborhood. Like many Peruvians descended from the Quechua people who were ruled by Incas before Spain conquered Peru, Mendieta is small in stature but muscular in build. He paused from a construction chore breaking rocks to chat.

When Mendieta arrived from the countryside in the mid-1970s he built a home on the stony hill where he still lives. Whether he looked to the west toward the sea or the east toward the Andes, he saw hardly anyone on the flats below his perch. The land there was either completely unused or sparsely farmed. He excavated a shallow well alongside his modest house. But the water table fell in time, and its contents became inaccessible.

Meanwhile farmers and shepherds from the highlands, some fleeing communist guerillas, others drawn to the allure of city life, populated the flats with what Peruvians call “human invasions.” They built sturdy brick homes at the foot of Mendieta’s rampart-like hill. Now about 150,000 people live in four contiguous neighborhoods there, none of which has running water.

Mendieta says that he and his neighbors gained the stature of a community worthy of receiving city water around 1988, and they petitioned the government to hook them up. After years of petitions and protest marches, the utility Sedepal finally built a cistern for the community that looks like a giant aspirin on top of a nearby hill. But that was in 2008 and the tank is still dry.

In the meantime, anyone in the area who wants water has to buy it from a truck. This morning I watched as a squadron of blue Sedepal tanker trucks careened through San Martin’s uneven dirt roads, tooting horns and ringing bells to alert customers. Put one or two Soles (about 50 cents) into the outstretched hand of a truck driver’s assistant and he’ll fill your barrel from the end of wide hose suitable for a fire truck. Activists I consulted complained that the water is about 20 times more expensive, and far less clean, than the same thing when piped.

As I wandered through Ex Fondo Naranjal, one of the four waterless communities I visited, backhoes scraped up buckets of dirt from the roads, digging square holes for sewer connections. The activists I talked to said that water pipes had already been installed. They said the utility promises it will pressurize the pipes later this year.
Mendieta, whose house sits on an imposing rock mound, says he hasn’t gotten such pipes yet. Digging trenches there are difficult, he says, giving Sedepal, his adversary for so many years, the benefit of the doubt. He’s optimistic that Sedapal will fill the community’s cistern soon, and after nearly 40 years even he will have running water in his home.

Next week I’ll speak with glaciologists who question whether, regardless of how many people have taps, Lima will be able to keep its promise of water for all. As global warming shrinks the country’s glaciers, the country might simply not have enough water on its dry western coast to match the increasing demand.

Daniel Grossman reports on climate change for The World. His multimedia work on science and the environment has been featured on PRI, NPR, National Geographic Online, The New York Times, Discover Magazine and Scientific American, among other outlets.

A cliff of crumbly soil impregnated with small stones towered above us, rising straight up about 200 feet to the neighborhood of Chorillos. Chorillos means “trickle,” a name derived from springs that once spurted from the ground and dribbled down the cliff. So impressed were inhabitants of this desert city with the lush vegetation watered from the steady spurts of natural irrigation, bearding the cliffs, that they named the area the Costa Verde or, green coast. Today, though, the cliff face is mostly bare, green only in artificially irrigated patches.

In Chorillos I interviewed the civil engineer Marcos Alegre Chang, director of the Center for Eco-efficiency and Social Responsibility. Chang oversees several programs to encourage water conservation. He explained that Lima is facing serious water shortages, which will only get worse.

Using a white board with black and red markers he showed me the simple math that proves his point. The entire city of Lima gets about 21 cubic meters of water per second from two sources, the Rimac River, which supplies 15 cubic meters per second and deep wells from which the balance is pumped.

This amount of water is pitifully small to meet the needs of 9 million people. The only desert city comparable to Lima is Cairo, which draws water from the Nile, a river with a flow 100 times greater. Lima is growing rapidly. Yet sources of water are becoming scarcer. Chang said the water table in Lima is plummeting about 5 feet a year. It was this over-harvesting of ground water that turned the Green Coast brown, he said. It will also soon make some drinking-water wells fallow.

The Rimac’s paltry contribution to Lima is also in danger of declining. An official at the city’s water utility explained to me that during the dry season, when little rain falls in the western slopes of the Andes, the Rimac relies on water held in reservoirs high in the Andes to provide sufficient flow. But melting glaciers and changes in precipitation could staunch flow into these man-made lakes.

The utility has proposed a variety of public works projects to make up the difference, such as an enormous tunnel under the Andes to divert water from the Amazon Basin to Lima. Marcos Alegre Chang says he thinks the city should improve water efficiency first, with low-flow toilets and the like, before blasting tunnel and building dams.

I’ll be interviewing more officials in Lima in the coming days to judge for myself which if any of these solutions could avert a water crisis in Lima’s future. First, tomorrow, I’ll fly over the Huaytapallana Glacier, one of the fastest retreating glaciers in Peru. I’ll report back here what I see.

Daniel Grossman reports on climate change for The World. His multimedia work on science and the environment has been featured on PRI, NPR, National Geographic Online, The New York Times, Discover Magazine and Scientific American, among other outlets.

About three quarters of these glaciers top Peruvian peaks providing the South American country with a natural resource of immense value and justifiable pride. But Peru’s glaciers, like most glaciers in the world, are melting at an alarming rate. The Peruvian Meteorology and Hydrology Service say that the country’s glaciers have lost about 20 percent of their volume since 1970.

The American glaciologist Lonnie Thompson once told me that he thinks he’ll live to stand on the bedrock that today holds up the world’s largest tropical glacier – the Quelccaya Ice Cap near Cuzco, Peru. He gave me this disheartening forecast in 2006 as we stood together atop Quelccaya, with several hundred feet of ice separating us from that rock foundation.

Today I visited another Peruvian glacier, topping a mountain known as Huaytapallana, and famous not for its size but the rate at which it has shrunk. A Peruvian government official reported earlier this year that studies of old photographs show that the surface area of the Huaytapallana glacier shrunk by 50 percent between 1986 and 2006. This visit was much briefer than my earlier trip to the Quelccaya, which involved a daylong jeep ride and two days trekking on foot, but grueling in its own way.

The visit began in the city of Pisco on the runway of a military base, which also hosts a small commercial airport. I met my pilot, Cesar Pareja Lopez, at the side of his two-engine Cessna. Normally Lopez flies a special photographic camera for Horizon Air, a firm that produces topographic maps. I was anxious to examine the hatch in the plane’s belly where Horizon mounts its optical gear, because I relished getting clear pictures of the glacier through the same hole.

I’ve taken many pictures from airplanes before but poor quality glass and plastic windows have always robbed the photos of their soul. However, Lopez hadn’t been informed that I wanted to shoot through the floor; he thought I was just wanted a tour, seated and belted safely in a seat. He said that if he opened the hatch, the plane would be cold and that we’d have to wear oxygen masks.

When these arguments didn’t dissuade, he said that I might fall out. Reluctantly, and with persuasion from my translator Dado, Mr. Lopez agreed to unscrew the metal lid covering the hole when it’s not in use. He gave me a form in triplicate absolving Horizon Air of responsibility if anything bad happened, and had me sign and ink a fingerprint on each page. I crawled into the Cessna’s hold and donned a rubber mask and noise-canceling headset.

At first I was afraid of the opening into empty space about the size of a basketball hoop. But soon I had convinced myself that it was smaller and no more scary than the trap door of my childhood tree house; except that this perch was more than two miles above the ground.

I started taking pictures sitting on my rear end, straddling the hole between my legs. But my back got sore and my lens was too far inside the plane. I lost my fear (or, some might say, my mind) quickly. By the time I reached Huaytapallana, near the city of Huancayo, I was lying on my tummy sticking my head nearly into empty space.

Clouds enshrouded the glacier when we arrived, after a cruise of an hour. I had pulled on my winter fleece as the cabin cooled. Mr. Lopez made several passes over the summit, chasing rents in the clouds through which I might snap a clear shot.

Each time he banked the plane and turned the aircraft on its side, he hooted loudly with excitement. My stomach grew queasy and I wondered if I’d get limp enough to slip out of the plane if I passed out.

In the end, my best shot was not straight down through the opening after all, but through a window from the side, as Mr. Lopez paralleled Hyallatapalla’s spine. The mountain’s white mantle of ice impressed me. But I could also see many black patches of rock like holes in a tattered tablecloth. Had these spots been white last year? Five years ago? I don’t know. I hope to find out, though, when I meet one of Peru’s leading glaciologists later this month.

One more thing: If you find a black Nikon lens cap in the desert somewhere between Huaynaco and Pisco, Peru, it’s mine.

Daniel Grossman reports on climate change for The World. His multimedia work on science and the environment has been featured on PRI, NPR, National Geographic Online, The New York Times, Discover Magazine and Scientific American, among other outlets.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll explore a question that is easy to state but hard to answer: how will the Peruvian capital respond to decline of its chief source of water as its population grows and the demand for the resource grows. I’ll talk to officials at many government agencies and visit shantytowns that have waited decades just to gain running water. I’ll circle low in a prop plane over Huaytapallana, a glacier that has suffered some of the most startling losses of ice.

There are no simple solutions to Peru’s challenge, and no guarantees of success. I will explore several ideas, some hopeful, others fanciful. I’ll join glaciologist Benjamin Morales on a research expedition to study how glaciers might be insulated against melting with a coating of sawdust. Entrepreneur Eduardo Gold will show me his work trying to cool mountaintops and regrow glaciers by painting summits white. And I’ll see billboard-size fog catchers springing up on sand dunes on Lima’s outskirts. Although it almost never rains there, heavy fog blankets the region for about half the year and these simple devices are already capturing precious trickles and easing the city’s problems slightly.

Please join me on my travels. I’ll post entries daily about who I’ve met, what I’ve seen and what I’m thinking. I’ll post a photo or two as well.

(Photo: John Otis)

So where is world capital that fast becomig a haven for international surfers…

The answer is Lima, Peru. Reporter by John Otis went the to check out the surfing scene there:

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Alberto Lopez runs a surf school on Miraflores beach, a stone’s throw from downtown Lima, Peru’s capital. He works seven days a week because so many people want to learn how to surf.

Though less famous than Hawaii, California or Australia, Peru is becoming a hotspot for surfing beginners to professionals. Peru boasts 1,500 miles of coastline and it’s home to Chicama, one of the world’s longest waves, which can carry surfers more than two miles. There are also 40-footers that attract daredevil surfers. And due to Peru’s location near the Equator, currents from the northern and southern hemispheres provide non-stop surfable waves.

“The good thing about this country is that we have waves all year round,” said Lopez. “Even Hawaii has not waves all year round. It’s seasonal.”

There’s even a belief that the concept of surfing originated some 2,000 years ago with indigenous fishermen in what is now northern Peru. Lopez said these fishermen had to negotiate massive Pacific waves aboard woven reed boats.

“And to come back to the shore, they have to paddle and catch a wave. So that means they ride waves, and they bring the fish and the nets in the back. So it’s proven that they’ve been surfing before Jesus’ time.”

The modern sport took off here in the 1940s when Peruvians brought back surf boards from Hawaii. The first surfing world championship, held in 1965, took place in Peru. But surfing suffered under Peru’s military government in the 1970s. Karin Sierralta, director of the Peruvian Surfing Federation, said import restrictions led to a surf board shortage. And later, he said, a terror campaign by Shining Path rebels scared away international surfers.

But now, Peru is relatively peaceful and surfing is making a comeback. It helps that Lima – home to 9 million people – is one of the few capital cities in the world with good surfing. Foreign surfers who land at Lima’s airport can be riding the waves within an hour.

Jessica Shaw, a British tourist, planned a three-day trip to Lima, but she got hooked on surfing and has stayed for months.

“I stood on my first wave here,” Shaw said. “This is the first place I’ve been where lots of girls are surfing. So that’s nice.”

There are some downsides to surfing the capital. The beaches are rocky. Sewage and industrial runoff can make the water a little murky. A few years ago, an American surfer ran into a dead cow. Still, throngs are signing up for private lessons.

Lopez gives a Swiss tourist, Isabel Zimmerman, a few pointers. “If there are big waves coming, you just wait. Chill. You are learning. You are not competing. Calm down, you are coming with one of the best coaches,” Lopez said.

Then he leads her across the rocks and into the pounding surf. “Okay, let’s go down, this is the time. Let’s go! Let’s go!” he yelled. Zimmerman manages to stand up and ride a few waves. Ninety minutes later, she emerges from the Pacific, tired but elated.

“How was it?” Lopez asked. “It was really fun,” Zimmerman said, laughing. “But scary!”

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