German judges and experts have arrived at the melting edge of Peru’s Andes to investigate a complaint made by a local farmer who accused the RWE giant of intimidating his home by contributing to global warming.A visit by a nine-member team to the region is the latest in a series of cases in which the plaintiffs hope to set a new example worldwide.Leading the way for the need for “climate justice” is 41-year-old Peruvian farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya, who lives in the mountains near the city of Huaraz.He filed a lawsuit against the German company RWE, claiming that its greenhouse gas emissions were the cause of the melting of nearby glaciers.
The trip was ordered by the Regional High Court in the northern German city of Hamm, where Lliuya filed an appeal against RWE, as his case was dismissed by another Essen court.The team has to determine the risk of melting glaciers placing the city of Huaraz and its 120,000 inhabitants under the Palcacocha ice.”We want the RWE company to be held accountable for environmental damage,” Lliuya, a farmer and tourism director backed by the German environmental organization Germanwatch, told AFP.”They have usually polluted the whole world and in this case we are trying to do something,” Lliuya added.RWE operates in 27 countries around the world, including Chile and Brazil, but not Peru.
The complaint was “initially rejected because it had no legal basis and did not respect German citizens’ law,” RWE spokesman Guido Steffen told AFP.”We hope this will happen again with a complaint.”The RWE emphasizes that “legally, individual producers are not responsible for global processes, which operate effectively around the world, such as climate change.”Lliuya and Germanwatch met during the COP20 climate change conference in Lima in 2014, after which German NGO activists traveled to Huaraz to discuss a possible application in Germany.
Feeling ‘impotent’
Lliuya says her biggest fear is that melting glaciers result in the Palcacocha lake overflowing.At an altitude of 4,650 feet (15,000 feet), a large blue lake sits beneath the glaciers of Palcaraju and Pucaranra in the Huascaran national park, and could flood Huaraz below if it explodes.But he says he feels “powerless” because “he knows he is in a dangerous situation and there are businesses and industries that have caused this.”
Lliuya owns half a hectare “chacra” —a Quechua word meaning small farm — on the slopes of a mountain.He owns chickens and sheep and grows corn and quinoa.Lliuya lives a simple life with her wife and two children. Their kitchen has a few dishes and a wide tree trunk that serves as a dining table.He fears that drought in groundwater could threaten local agriculture and Huaraz water supply.
War in German courts
The case against RWE was filed in 2015 and the German company won for the first time the following year. But in 2017, the Hamm court agreed to hear the case.The specialist visit, ordered in 2019, was delayed due to the COVID-19 epidemic.Germanwatch and Lliuya want RWE to pay the cost of protecting Huaraz from any potential floods.”This case refers to our historic emissions of greenhouse gases, and we have been complying with government restrictions, including our emissions of carbon dioxide,” said RWE, which set a goal of being carbon neutral by 2040.Peru has lost 51 percent of its glaciers in the last 50 years, national water authorities say by 2020.Noah Walker-Crawford, a climate change researcher at University College London (UCL) and Germanwatch analyst, told AFP that 1,800 people died in 1941 when Palcacocha flooded Huaraz due to snow.
For more read: https://phys.org/news/2022-05-climate-effect-peruvian-glaciers-debated.html
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