At Iguazu Falls, a World Heritage site and one of South America’s tourist highlights, crowds normally gather in the drifting spray of 275 spectacular waterfalls, spread in an arc around them on the border between Argentina and Brazil. This month, however, it’s not just the coronavirus pandemic that has closed the famed attraction. A strengthening drought that threatens much of southern South America has reduced the once-mighty falls to slender rivulets.
The nearby Parana River, similarly, is at its lowest level in 50 years, leaving ships stranded, hydropower production slashed and government officials in northeast Argentina worrying about whether water for drinking and hand-washing will hold out during the COVID-19 pandemic. Little new rain is expected for months. “The rainy season in Brazil, which runs from December to April, is ending and it has hardly rained,” said Gustavo Villa Uría, an undersecretary for public waterworks in Argentina’s government. Climate change “likely” is playing a role in the changes, and deforestation in southern Brazil “has an undeniable effect”, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
For now, lack of water is a big problem for towns like Puerto Iguazu, where authorities have had to hand out bottled water since March after the community’s water intakes ran dry. Some residents in the town of 45,000 are sourcing water by hauling tanks to three local wells opened for free public use. Cecilia Britto, a legislator from Argentina’s Misiones province, one of those hardest hit, blamed the drought on “deforestation and global warming” – but said Brazil was also carefully managing its water supplies “at the expense of downstream peoples”.
Source: Trust
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