Two Andean agricultural engineers are learning from their ancestors and catching water in artificial ‘lagoons’ to avoid drought. They are being built high in the Peruvian mountains to cope with the effects of melting glaciers that leave many communities short of water.

About 40 years ago, the snow that once covered the Andes mountains near the Peruvian city of Ayacucho started to disappear.

Water became scarce for more than 200,000 people in the south-central region, most of them from the Quechua indigenous community.

"We had to ration water. Some years, we had water for only two hours a day," said Dersi Zevallos, a coordinator with Peru's water and sanitation regulator, SUNASS.

Then, Quechua sisters Magdalena and Marcela Machaca - both agricultural engineers - found a solution by looking to the past. They built reservoirs high in the mountains to harvest and "cultivate" rainwater, the same way their ancestors did.

Climate change has led to increasingly dry conditions for communities in the Peruvian Andes, data shows.

In 1984, around 130 cm (50 inches) of rainwater fell in Ayacucho, according to SUNASS. Now the city gets only half that much rain every year.

Glaciers, another source of water for the Quechua, have also been affected by warming temperatures.
Treating nature like a living being

Across Peru, glaciers lost nearly 30% of their area between 2000 and 2016, according to a study published last September in geosciences journal The Cryosphere.

"Climate is a living being to us," Marcela told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "And lately it's been acting a little crazy."

To help cope with the situation, manmade mountain-top reservoirs - which locals call lagoons - capture and store water during the rainy season from November to February, she explained on a tour of one she and her sister built.

In the dry season, the water filters through the ground to recharge the rivers and aquifers used by local authorities to provide water to residents and farms.

"The lagoons play the role that the frozen mountain-tops used to play," Marcela said.

The Quechua people consider the reservoirs sacred, she noted, believing they "nurture" water at the start of its life. "Our communities are the protectors of water and we are proud of that," she added.

The sisters built their first reservoir back in 1995 through their organisation, the Bartolome Aripaylla Association, which uses traditional knowledge to help indigenous communities improve their economic activities.

Since then, they have built more than 120, which together provide Ayacucho with more than 130 million cubic metres of water for human and agricultural use.

Sally Bunnings, a water management expert at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said the impact of climate change on mountain glaciers, which are melting as global temperatures rise, poses a threat to high-altitude communities.

They should follow the Quechua example of trying to use water resources as efficiently as possible, she added.

"From an early age they should learn to (recognise) and prevent the effects of abrupt change in temperature and make good use of water," she said.

Almost a quarter of Peru's population identifies itself as Quechua, making up the country's largest ethnic group, according to the latest census in 2017.

Marcela said she and her sister first heard about the ancient spiritual practice of "nurturing water" through their grandfather when they were children in the 1970s.

By that time, it was no longer practised, she added.

Then, just as the snow in Ayacucho's mountains started to dwindle, conflict came to the area. Read the whole story from the link above