Climate change could cost Andean countries 30 billion dollars a year, study reveals - as per press release from Comunidad Andina Headquarters in Lima, Peru.

Lima, May 9, 2008.- Losses in the four Andean countries as a result of climate change could add up to 30 billion dollars a year by 2025. This figure, equivalent to 4.5% of their GDP, could place Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru’s potential for development in jeopardy.

This is only one of the revealing figures unveiled in the study “Climate Change knows no borders,”* prepared at the initiative of the Andean Community General Secretariat by a team of researchers from Universidad del Pacífico del Perú with the collaboration of other academic and research centers and authorities of Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador and the support of Spain’s Environment Ministry and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).

During the presentation of the report, the research team coordinator, Peru’s former Agriculture Minister, Carlos Amat y León, insisted that “climate change is already happening,” as shown by glacial loss, more frequent flooding and stronger and more frequent occurrences of El Niño.

“Floods, droughts, landslides, frosts, and landslips virtually doubled between 2002 and 2006, as compared with the five-year period 1987-1991. Since 1970, every single province in the CAN countries has experienced at least one hydrometeorological disaster,” the coordinator pointed out.

He stated that climate change has been evident in the subregion for over three decades. “While changes in global temperature have amounted to 0.2ºC per decade since 1990, in the central Andean region the rise in temperature between 1974 and 1998 was 0.34ºC –in other words, 70% more than the global average.”

Amat y León warned that if the temperature rises over 2°C, the Andean countries will find themselves in a serious situation. “The Amazon could begin to collapse as glacial retreat intensifies, jeopardizing the supply of water,” he announced.

Even if this does not happen, he cautioned, “by 2020, deglaciation in the Andes could put close to 40 million people at risk of losing their water supply for drinking, hydroenergy and farming, particularly in Quito, Lima and La Paz.

A fact that should be considered, he stated, is that the people who will witness the effects of climate change are already alive and under the age of 33; they make up 64 percent of the population today.

Amat y León emphasized that in order to be able to address this common challenge, the international community must have a strong interest in cooperating in the efforts of Andean countries to cope with the effects of climate change and learn from this experience.

He went on to add that it is essential to have an action plan in place that contains substantive measures like transferring technology to produce clean energy; sharing knowledge and capacities; receiving financial contributions proportional to the size of the problem; making changes in production processes to bring them into line with the new parameters imposed by climate change; and reinforcing the capacity for governance, particularly the capacity of local governments to design and implement economic and social infrastructure.

The Secretary General of the Andean Community, Freddy Ehlers, for his part, pointed out that because the current development model is incompatible with the planet’s sustainability, it is necessary to define a new development model that will guarantee man’s integral development and his harmonious relationship with nature.

He also emphasized the need to take more coordinated action to mitigate and adjust to climate change, including the adoption of commitments to reduce emissions and to develop new mechanisms and incentives for conserving forests and biodiversity, as stipulated in the Bali working plan on climate change and the objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Ehlers revealed that a recent study based on data taken from the Stern Report, the Ecological Footprint and the World Bank states that Andean countries could receive billions of dollars from industrialized countries in return for the environmental services provided to the entire world by Amazon tropical forests. “These forests are a basic bargaining chip of the Andean countries with the international community,” he concluded.

* The complete document can be seen at the CAN’s following website address: