Accents
Argentina Measures Climate Change Impacts
By Marcela Valente

A 1.14-million-dollar project announced for assessing Argentina's vulnerability to the effects of global warming.

BUENOS AIRES, (Tierramérica).- Around 100 Argentine scientists and technicians will work on a project over the next two years that will measure the greenhouse gas emissions that lead to climate change and determine where the country's vulnerabilities are with respect to rising global temperatures.

The project is to be financed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which will grant the government 1.14 million dollars for the effort, but the coordination and administration of the program is in the hands of the non-governmental Fundación Bariloche.

Economist Daniel Bouille, president of the foundation, told Tierramérica that "the project will allow us to know how vulnerable the country is to changes in climate." And said that the focus areas "are priorities determined by their importance from the economic and social perspectives."

The project has four objectives. The first is to take an inventory of emissions of gases that contribute to global warming, to be presented in a report to the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The first report was made in 1990, and its data were updated in 1999. The study will now take figures from 2000 to conduct a new measurement, which will be in the hands of 10 experts from the Fundación Bariloche who took part in the first inventory.

Greenhouse gas emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels in Argentina represent 0.5 percent of the global total. The country ratified the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions in 2001.

The second objective of the project is to determine Argentina's vulnerability to climate variations and the increase in average temperatures in the long term. There will be 90 scientists and technicians from institutions from throughout the country working on that effort, and it is where most of the funds are going, according to Bouille.

There is an array of problems found in key areas, in terms of economic and social factors, and that is where the experts will focus their work, says Raúl Estrada Oyuela, director of environmental affairs for the Argentine foreign ministry.

Estrada told Tierramérica that they will analyze, for example, the impacts of climate change on agriculture in Argentina's central humid Pampas. In this fertile region, which provides most of the country's farm exports, heavy rains have caused flooding in recent times.

Just over a year ago, nearly 20 percent of the cultivated area in this flat region was under water.

Under normal conditions, the water filters into the subterranean layers or evaporates, but after a period of heavy precipitation, the ground's absorption capacity was exhausted. The problem is aggravated if the type of crop does not contribute to evaporation, as occurred with soybeans, Argentina's leading export, which covers half of the country's cultivated area.

There are regions in the northeast where prolonged drought is hurting the operations of hydroelectric dams. In others, intense rains cause devastating floods, as occurred in 2003 in the western province of Santa Fe, with the Salado River.

The inundation occurred in just a few hours, affecting half of the provincial capital and killing 23 people. Thousands of families were left homeless as entire neighborhoods along the river disappeared under water.

Another area of study is the effect of rising temperatures on sea levels in Buenos Aires province, where windstorms from the south cause the Río de la Plata to rise, triggering damage along the shores.

Also to be assessed is soil deterioration in the Patagonia region, in southern Argentina. The area has been affected by desertification, but could be hit by increasingly torrential rains as a result of climate change, aggravating the soil erosion problem.

Formulating a National Mitigation Program is the third objective, and entails reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, which retain heat in the Earth's atmosphere. Experts are to propose policies and actions to neutralize the harm produced by carbon dioxide and methane gases.

By way of example, Estrada pointed to a study being conducted by Argentine scientists to reduce methane emissions from livestock by changing the diet of cattle, which has the added benefit of improved beef and milk.

Finally, the project calls for training in climate change, and raising public awareness about the relationship between emissions, temperature increases and the impacts of climate change on the population.

* Marcela Valente is an IPS correspondent