The Economist June 4th 2 022 37
The AmericasPeruFight the power company
I
t takes twobumpy hours in a 4x4 to
climb from the city of Huaraz, 3,000 me-
tres up in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca moun-
tain range, to the turquoise puddle of Lake
Palcacocha, 1,500m higher. On May 25th a
convoy of 16 vehicles made the ascent,
kicking up dust as it went. It carried an un-
usual group of people, including a Huara-
cino farmer, his lawyers, judges from Ger-
many and Peru, and climate scientists.
It was the farmer, Saúl Luciano Lliuya,
who had brought them together. In 2015,
Mr Luciano Lliuya (pictured) teamed up
with Germanwatch, a German green ngo,
to sue rwe, Germany’s largest power com-
pany and Europe’s second-largest emitter,
for belching nearly 7bn tonnes of green-
house gases between 1854 and 2010. This,
he says, has put his house at risk of a devas-
tating flood. Last week’s expedition
marked the first step of his claim. If he
wins, there would be global implications.
Mr Luciano Lliuya, his lawyers and Ger-
manwatch say that the pile-up of green-
house gases in the atmosphere has acceler-
ated the melting of the glaciers above Pal-
cacocha, causing the lake to swell danger-ously. They say there is an imminent
danger that an avalanche, landslide or both
will send hundreds of thousands of cubic
metres of snow, ice, rock and dirt crashing
into the water, causing a tsunami-like
wave that will break through the lake’s bar-
riers and rush downstream, destroying
and burying everything in its path. Scien-
tists call such events “glacier-lake outburst
floods”. They are a growing concern in the
Himalayas as well as the Andes.
In 1941 the second-most deadly such
glacier-lake outburst flood on record sub-
merged large parts of Huaraz when Lake
Palcacocha burst through the natural dam
that held it back. Between 1,800 and 4,000
people died. The lake now holds 34 times
more water than it did before 1941—water
that was previously solid ice. By destabilis-ing the glaciers, climate change has also
increased the risk of an avalanche or land-
slide big enough to trigger another flood.
Officials say that 50,000 of Huaraz’s
120,000 inhabitants are at risk, including
Mr Luciano Lliuya.
Engineering solutions do exist. Ones
put in place after 1941, intended to be tem-
porary, include two modest dams and ten
large pvcpipes to siphon water away from
the lake. A more ambitious plan, involving
higher dams and better siphons, lingers in
government files. Mr Luciano Lliuya’s
claim asks rweto pay 0.47% of the costs of
implementing it.The landscape is changing
That calculation comes from a study pub-
lished in 2014 by Richard Heede of the Cli-
mate Accountability Institute, an Ameri-
can environmental organisation, which
found that the activities of 90 large indus-
trial emitters collectively accounted for
63% of the carbon dioxide and methane
emitted between 1854 and 2010. This share
is further broken down to the company
level, laying the responsibility for 0.47% of
historical emissions at rwe’s door.
The case was thrown out in 2016. But in
a surprise appeal ruling in November 2017,
the higher regional court of Hamm, in Ger-
many, decided it merited going one step
further. The case rests on being able to con-
vince the court of two key points: that Lake
Palcacocha poses an imminent threat to Mr
Luciano Lliuya’s property and that rwe
bears some responsibility.HUARAZ
A climate lawsuit pits a Peruvian farmer against Germany’s largest electricity firm→Also in this section
38 Adapting to climate change
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— Bello is away