The Humboldt Current sustains Peruvian anchoveta, the world’s largest fishery with an annual catch of 4-8 million metric tons. (Photo by Andre Baertschi)
Across Latin America and the Caribbean, climate-change impacts on ice fields, rivers and coastal waters are painfully apparent. They range from this year’s calving of massive icebergs from Chile’s Grey Glacier to floods and mudslides ravaging Peruvian villages in 2017 to once-a-century tropical storms now seeming to hit the Caribbean every few years. The prospect of far more such events looms large in a report issued this month by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Compiled by over 100 experts drawing on some 7,000 studies, the report details how global warming is altering the world’s waters. “This reinforces the need to work very, very hard to control [greenhouse] emissions now,” says Douglas Rader, oceans scientist for the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund. “The payoff comes from not waiting.” By 2100, the report says, ocean-water heat waves could become 20 to 50 times... [Log in to read more]
