Already a luxury, water gets more scarce for the poor

LA PAZ, Bolivia – Shoemaker Benjamin Burgoa Mamani remembers arriving here from the country to a squatter’s settlement of adobe brick shacks where hundreds like him shared a single well.

When it ran dry, daily, it took painfully long to refill.

“The person who got up the earliest would get the biggest amount of water,” he said in Spanish.

Three years later, he’s happy the community installed a tap a few hundred yards from his home.

Water is a luxury in the homes of the world’s poorer families; a luxury that’s becoming even more scarce here.

Even as jobs beckon rural migrants to the seat of government in South America’s poorest nation, the water supply above them is melting away. Glaciers that gradually offered up crucial water to the rivers in past dry seasons are now quickly disappearing.

Climate change and water scarcity — in South America, Arizona and around the globe — fall hardest on the poor. Already lacking water and the resources to import more, people including those on the western Navajo Reservation in Arizona, rely on trucked water or on wells of questionable safety. Meanwhile, extended drought is turning former grazing lands to dunes.

Scientists are attempting to quantify the disparity in climate effects on poor nations, using hits to gross domestic product.

In January a team from Stanford University published a study in the journal Nature Climate Change projecting that if global carbon emissions keep growing and temperatures in 2100 climb 4.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, that heat will trim this century’s economic growth by 40 percent in poor countries.

Such a figure is about three times worse than the stunted growth that rich nations would face, they found. Most poor nations, they wrote, are hotter to begin with and are more reliant on farming and other climate-challenged industries.

Within Bolivia, the poorest of the poor lacked running water even before climate threatened the source. Activists have pushed for industrial water reuse and a halt to the use of drinking water on park landscapes, so far with little success. Now groups such as Red Habitat are helping select residents install rooftop systems to collect rainwater.

“This is the beginning,” said David Quezada, who directs that Bolivian housing and urban affairs aid group.

“Our struggle is that people know they have rights, and they have to demand them.”

People talk of leaving the city when the water runs dry and migrating to Lake Titicaca. But that high-altitude lake, the largest in South America, also needs glacial melt. As with glaciers across the Andes, the source is melting too fast, threatening a steep decline in future streamflows.

Shifting rains also worry residents.

Lake Titicaca fisherman Mario Charca Lujano fears that his family will have to leave for city jobs if trends continue. They have lived in huts on floating islands made of matted reeds for generations, and he has draped gillnets from small, open boats for 30 years. The women fry the salty, finger-length fish over reed-fired clay stoves.

“It’s part of our culture, part of our lives,” 48-year-old Charca Lujano said after gathering a morning’s haul in March.

Now rain patterns have shifted, he said, and during dry season the reeds he fishes among and chews for refreshment have little water cover. Fish head for deeper water, and the family relies more on fees from tourists who come to see their island.

Researchers sampling several hundred thousand years of lake sediments have determined that Lake Titicaca is substantially lower in periods of little glaciation, when temperatures were similar to those predicted for later this century. That’s potentially troubling for La Paz as it looks for new supplies and could consider tapping the lake.

“If global warming continues as it looks like right now,” Bolivian Mountain Institute Director Dirk Hoffmann said, “lake levels will go down.”

Burgoa Mamani, 48, lives easier in La Paz now that he can push his wheelbarrow to a piped community tap that doesn’t run dry — for the time being. But his confidence in the future is shaken.

Asked if there will be enough water here for the rest of his life, or for his 3-year-old daughter Carina’s, he shook his head.

“The city is blowing up,” he said, referring to metropolitan La Paz’s population rush of thousands per year.

Its water supply is expected to shrink by up to a fifth as the Andean glaciers retreat in the next few decades, victim of global climate change.

The American West is hardly alone in facing a warming climate that threatens water supplies.

Just like urban Arizonans and Californians, the millions living in the western shadows of the Andes look to the mountains for snow and ice to supply a critical portion of their water. And they are just one example.

“On a global scale, we’re facing a crisis,” said Jenny Kehl, director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Water Policy. Among the “water rich” regions, “it’s not understood how serious this crisis is and how quickly it will advance.”

Conflicts such as recent unrest in Yemen are stoked in part by water scarcity, she said. Helping poorer countries conserve water or build storage capacity will become imperative, because creating millions of drought refugees is not in America’s interest.

The U.S. also has a moral obligation, she said, given its outsize contribution to the historic carbon emissions driving climate change.

“We contributed to this,” she said, “and we have the ability to adapt when some others don’t.”

The suffering is mounting for Bolivians. They don’t have adequate reservoirs to capture the full meltwater runoff.

The poorest neighborhoods in and around La Paz have no running water; others have nightly cutoffs because there’s not enough in the pipes to go around.

The old city of La Paz has more than 800,000 residents, but its metropolitan area has sprawled past 2 million in a flash.

A water treatment plant for El Alto, a suburb built from the ground up in 30 years and now larger than 470-year-old La Paz, was meant for 500,000 people. It serves 1 million, intermittently.

Shoemaker Burgoa Mamani’s neighborhood, in the upper heights of a La Paz district called Pura Pura, is a clear example of how climate change is stressing the poor first and hardest.

It’s on a dry dirt hillside with what would be a million-dollar view in America: overlooking a band of trees by a river, then the city and, beyond it, the hulking snowcapped Illimani, a mountain that the rural residents at its foot call “water bearer.”

There are 610 homes and three taps.

Some on the hillside have outhouses. Other residents, including Burgoa Mamani, hike down to the river.

Many of the metal-roofed shacks are uninhabited for lack of water. Those living in the rest pooled their money to build several community taps. Only now the stretched-thin supply is getting thinner.

The most striking visual clue is Chacaltaya Glacier. It isn’t there anymore.

Above 17,000 feet, Chacaltaya had the highest ski chairlift in the world. Its shrinkage accelerated from the 1980s until it disappeared in 2009.

Now the focus is elsewhere in the Cordillera Real, a range of the Andes with a glacial sprawl in sight of El Alto and whose normal yearly melt has supplied up to 20 percent of the city’s water, according to Red Habitat. Rainfall also contributes.

Scientific surveys have monitored an ice loss of about a third since 1980.

“This melt is irreversible,” said Quezada, the group’s director. Twenty percent of El Alto’s water will be gone by 2045.

Red Habitat — red means “network” in Spanish — is working to help El Alto residents reduce consumption of the glacier-fed rivers. It has helped 30 families install rooftop rain catchers that funnel into 450-liter tanks, which hold a little more than two 55-gallon drums. The water can then be used for washing and flushing a toilet, saving tap water for cooking.

The tanks are helping these families, and Red Habitat seeks grants to expand them.

“You can imagine what would happen with 30,000 homes,” Quezada said. “That’s what we intend.”

Each installation is valued a little under $300, though the families usually provide about half of that through their own work.

El Alto residents don’t have lawns or any landscaping of the kind that sponges most residential water in the western United States. Each resident uses 67 liters — about 18 gallons — per day. The comparable figure in Phoenix is nine times higher: 160 gallons.

Yet the savings from these catchments add up for the poor.

In El Alto’s Solidarity neighborhood of mud-block-walled streets, several families now using them reported saving about 75 percent on their water bills during the annual rainy season. They have taps in their yards, but Red Habitat is trying to preserve that water for the whole city.

“We don’t want the toilet to use potable water anymore,” Quezada said.

Hilaria Rosas Vilca has no toilet yet. Her family uses a walled-off pit in the corner of their yard in the Solidarity neighborhood. Others around the neighborhood have illegal toilets with pipes leading directly to a stream.

For now, Rosas Vilca has one of the rooftop rain systems and is waiting for a sewage connection to use the new water source for sanitation. It supplements a drinking water tap in the yard.

While her sons filled soda bottles with water from their tap, the 39-year-old woman washed a blanket with rainwater and rung it out over a tub for reuse. She said they sometimes drink the rainwater, as well.

It’s a big help, she said, though she does not believe there will be enough water for her children to stay in the city as the glaciers melt.

“We could go to look for water,” she said, maybe to Lake Titicaca. “We can do everything only with water.”

She and others in the Solidarity neighborhood are lucky. Those with established in-home water connections pay less than 30 cents per 1,000 liters. Those who require trucking pay at least 12 times as much, and get dirtier water, Quezada said. Bacteria from contaminated trucks or cisterns may sicken them.

Bolivians are bracing for the worst. Though they hope for government action to build reservoirs to store more rainwater for all of La Paz, Quezada said, Red Habitat has ambitions that are smaller but no less profound.

“We are creating a new water culture with assistance from the people,” he said.

“We believe that water is a human right.”