Andes

"Quira, a traditional doctor in the Purace indigenous reserve, leaves a piece of meat on a rock and uses a sprig of sage to drizzle it with a herbal infusion. In his other hand he holds a stick, while his backpack is filled with medicinal plants. Shortly after, a bird spanning three meters from wingtip to wingtip appears through the clouds covering the clearing and swoops down to feast on the offering. The Kokonukos indigenous people consider both the condor and the rock where it perches to be sacred. The volunteers are helping biologists count the condors, one of the largest birds of prey in the world, to help the species survive."

“The remarkable rediscovery of species once thought extinct, especially so close to the city of La Paz, illustrates how sustainable development that embraces conservation of nature can ensure long-term protection of biodiversity as well as the benefits ecosystems provide to people. This area has become a safe haven for amphibians, reptiles, butterflies, and plants that haven’t been found anywhere else on earth.”

"Chile has one of the world’s largest reserves of fresh water outside the north and south poles, but the abundant glaciers that are the source of that precious commodity are melting fast. That’s not just an ecological disaster in the making, it’s rapidly becoming an economic and political dilemma for the government of Latin America’s richest nation. A toxic cocktail of rising temperatures, the driest nine-year period on record and human activity, including mining, is proving lethal for the ice of Chile’s central region. Built up over thousands of years, the ice mass is now retreating one meter per year on average."

"Chimborazo's glaciers have lost about 20% of their surface area since the 1980s, and the 2.5-square-kilometer Reschreiter has retreated by more than 1 kilometer, he says. Leonardo Punina Tuolombo, who grew up in an Indigenous community nearby, has watched it happen. "All the time, the glacier moves higher," says Punina Tuolombo, 37, who guides and outfits hikers and has a small farm—five cows and fields of garlic—at an elevation of 4200 meters. "I remember when I was a boy, the glacier was tremendous," he says. "Now, it's rock.""

According to decades-long research, Andean glaciers are melting faster than at any point in the past 10,000 years, which may critically threaten the region's water supply. “‘Supply is down. But demand is up because of growing populations’ said Lonnie Thompson, a climate scientist at Ohio State's Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. ‘By 2100, the best case scenario is that half of the ice will disappear. Worst-case scenario: two-thirds of it will. And you've got all those people depending on the glacier for water.’”

“It was some of the strongest evidence yet for the long-standing prediction by scientists that climate change will lead — is leading now — to widespread loss of wildlife. University of British Columbia ecologist Ben Freeman and his co-authors summed up their findings with a chilling metaphor: Mountain birds, they wrote, are ‘riding an escalator to extinction.’”

"When the breathtaking news arrived, everybody mourned. “Desierto florido”, or flowering desert, returned to the Atacama Desert in Chile, the earth’s driest place, some four years before the usual time ... In August 2017, nature wished to take a break from her routine; maybe to pause and shout out a message. This month when the Desierto florido returned to Atacama, it ditched its usual five-seven years cycle. An unusual spell of rains preceded the flowering; almost putting at stake the place’s undesirable, but much-revered superlative of being the driest place on earth ... Scientifically and figuratively, Atacama is the new landscape to witness the impacts of climate change in its totality.

"These slopes “were covered by forest 1,000 years ago, but now they’re bare,” largely because of the fires set to clear land for subsistence agriculture said Dourojeanni, an agronomist and forest engineer who was head of the Inter-American Development Bank’s environment division in the 1990s. The result: torrential flows of water that flood Bolivia’s lowlands before heading on to Brazil ... This year, 60 people died and 68,000 families were displaced by the flooding"

“The condor is an extremely important bird for Ecuador, much like the Bald Eagle is for the United States . . . It is a symbol of the country and is even on the national coat-of-arms. Without question, it captures the imagination of Ecuadorians unlike any other animal. Protecting it was a major motivating force behind so many people coming together to make this happen."

"Thousands of people in northern Peru have protested against plans for a huge open-cast gold mine in the high Andes. People in the Cajamarca region say the proposed Conga mine will cause pollution and destroy water supplies."

“Water diversion and contamination associated with mining in Cajamarca has seriously damaged the region’s waterscapes. Yanacocha, a huge gold mine owned by the US. Newmont Mining Corporation and the Peruvian Buenaventura Mining Company (and financed by the World Bank), uses cyanide solution and massive quantities of water to process ore. Sited at the headwaters of five major rivers in the region, the mine has contaminated them and altered their flows, reducing the supply for downstream irrigation."

At some unknown moment early this year, Bolivia’s 18,000-year-old Chacaltaya Glacier – once the highest ski resorts on Earth – officially vanished. Its meltdown began in the mid-1980s. In 1998, Dr. Ramirez predicted its complete disappearance in 2015. His models were too optimistic. The rate of thaw tripled in the last 10 years due to accelerated climate change and quickened the death of the Andean glacier. . . The thaw is putting a vital fresh water source at risk."

“On April 23 and 24, smog put Santiago, Chile’s 5 million inhabitants under an environmental ‘state of emergency.’ This meant that the one thousand largest factories had to shut down, and 40 percent of the cars (those using leaded gasoline and without catalytic converters) were banned from the roads. In a controversial step, the National Environmental Commission (CONAMA) banned all vehicles except buses from Santiago’s six major avenues, to speed travel for buses and encourage car drivers to use them… Chilean president Ricardo Lago put forward a plan developed by his predecessors that included relocating industries, expanding bus and metro systems, paving dirt streets in poor neighborhoods, and reforesting the city.”

""Between the years 1991 and 2000 Codelco removed between 1- 8 million tonnes of ice per year … The destruction of glaciers "must leave us outraged and as Chileans we must demand that the company that claims to be our pride not destroy glaciers during its mining operations,""